Stories in Stone

The Oldest Stones

The twenty oldest stones in the archive, every one from the eighteenth century or before. The list reaches back to a worn slab of 1667 to Dionysius Harty at Killodiernan, and gathers the earliest of the Cromwellian planters — Elizabeth Harrison of Cloughjordan (1689), the Trenches of Modreeny, the Bindons and the Finches — down to the priests and children of Queen Anne's reign. Their lettering is worn and their spelling older still ('Here lyeth the body…'), and on some barely a name survives. Read together they are the deepest layer of memory in the graveyards of Tipperary: the twenty oldest markers still standing across Ormond.