Templemurry Grave Yard, Clonaspoe, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Templemurry Grave Yard, Clonaspoe, Co. Tipperary

A low hillock rising out of poorly drained grassland in County Tipperary, with the Multeen river running some 150 metres to the east, is an unlikely setting for what turns out to be a quietly complex ancient site.

The graveyard at Templemurry occupies a roughly circular enclosure, measuring around 55 metres northwest to southeast and 60 metres east to west, bounded by an earth and stone bank with external stone facing surviving in places. Inside the northern quadrant of this enclosure stands the remains of a church, and scattered across the interior are outcrops of bare rock pushing through the surface, which may mark the positions of graves connected to that church. It is the kind of detail that rewards attention: no obvious headstones, just stone emerging from the ground, quietly suggesting the presence of the dead.

The enclosure itself belongs to a type well known in early Irish ecclesiastical sites, where a curving bank, sometimes called a cashel when built primarily of stone, defines a sacred or monastic precinct. Here, the bank survives to an internal height of between 0.2 and 0.6 metres and an external height of between one and 1.5 metres, suggesting it was once considerably more substantial. From the western arc through the north and northeast, it has been reduced to little more than a low scarp, though elsewhere it continues to function as a field boundary, which is often what saves such earthworks from disappearing entirely. Modern gaps have been opened at the north and southwest, and a trackway now cuts straight through the graveyard to reach a farm shed built just outside the southern edge of the enclosure. The surrounding land has been planted with deciduous trees in recent years, and the plantation has, notably, kept its distance from the monument itself, leaving the enclosure standing clear within a young woodland.

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