Kyleturraheen, Turraheen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Kyleturraheen, Turraheen, Co. Tipperary

On a north-facing slope in the uplands above the Turraheen river valley in County Tipperary, a small natural hillock carries the remains of an early ecclesiastical enclosure whose most quietly unsettling feature is a set of low, unmarked stones.

These plain orthostats, arranged in rows on a north-south axis in the eastern part of the site, may mark the graves of unbaptised children, interred in a cillín, the informal burial ground used for those whom the Church would not admit to consecrated ground. Whether that is what they represent, or whether they simply belong to an older graveyard associated with the church itself, remains unresolved.

The hillock on which all of this sits is enclosed by an earthen bank, roughly D-shaped, measuring about fifty metres east to west and thirty-eight metres across at its widest. The bank itself is accompanied by an inner fosse, or ditch, which together would have given the site a clearly defined boundary in the early medieval period. This kind of enclosure is characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical settlements, where the sacred space was physically demarcated from the surrounding landscape. At the summit of the hill, barely visible now, lie the wall-footings of a possible church, and what may be a bullaun stone or stoup. A bullaun is a large stone with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface, often associated with early Christian sites and sometimes believed to have had a ritual or medicinal function. A holy well survives roughly six hundred metres to the south-east, suggesting that this entire area of upland Tipperary once supported a cluster of sacred and community sites. The enclosure itself has been partially cut through on its southern side by a modern road, which gives some measure of how quietly such places are absorbed into the working landscape over centuries.

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