A 10th-century round tower and the high cross of Muiredach
Monasterboice
Two minutes south of the Tinure junction, on a small lane signposted off the R132, is Mainistir Bhuithe — the monastery of Saint Buithe (or Buite), a 5th-century Irish monk who studied with Martin of Tours and died around 521. The monastic settlement that grew up here lasted into the 13th century. What survives is a 10th-century round tower (28 metres, the conical roof gone), the ruins of two churches, and three high crosses — including the great west cross of Muiredach, dated to around 900 AD, which is one of the finest examples of figured high-cross sculpture anywhere in Ireland. The graveyard is still in use by the surrounding parishes. National Monument. Free. Open all year. The reason Tinure is on this list.
An older landscape under the village
House of the yew
Tigh an Iúir — house of the yew — is the placename. The yew is one of the longest-lived trees in Europe, sacred in pre-Christian Ireland, and a marker in the landscape that early Christian monks tended to incorporate into their sites rather than cut down. Whether the yew that named Tinure stood at the junction itself, or in an older monastic enclosure, is no longer recoverable. The name has outlived the tree. The five-road pattern — older than the tarmac, older than the church — is the kind of landscape feature that suggests a meeting point that mattered before anyone wrote anything down.
A village built around its parish
The 1894 church
The Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception was built in 1894, on the apex of the five-road junction, and is the reason the village has a centre at all. The civil parish of Monasterboice is much older — the boundaries are medieval — but the working centre of parish life shifted away from the round-tower site to the new church on the road in the late 19th century. The 1894 building is plain Gothic Revival, slate-roofed, with a small graveyard. The dedication is the standard one for that decade in Ireland; the location is the unusual thing.
Why Tinure is bigger than it was
The M1 effect
In 2002 the village had 296 people. By 2016 it was 464 — a 57 per cent increase in fourteen years. The reason is sitting a kilometre east: the M1 motorway. Tinure became commutable to north Dublin and inner Drogheda once the road was open. Most of the new houses are along the radiating roads from the junction, on what used to be roadside fields. The village pattern is medieval; the housing stock is post-2000. Both are now Tinure.