Kilcooley's screen wall
The mermaid in the abbey
When the Cistercian monks rebuilt Kilcooley Abbey after the fire of 1445, they commissioned carvings for the chancel screen wall that have no real equivalent in Ireland. Among the apostles and the crucifixion scenes is a mermaid - carved in stone, holding a comb and a mirror, on the wall of a twelfth-century monastery. Nobody is quite sure what she's doing there. The tomb of Piers Fitz Oge Butler nearby was carved by Rory O'Tunney in 1526, the same hand that worked the limestone at Jerpoint. The estate is private, but the ruins have public access. The lane from the car park at the Protestant church takes you right to the door.
Slieveardagh coalfield
The anthracite hills
The Slieveardagh Hills around Gortnahoe sit above one of Ireland's only coalfields - a seam of anthracite, high quality but fractured and thin, that runs roughly 11 kilometres across east Tipperary. By the early 1800s, an estimated 35 collieries were operating in these hills, employing around 1,000 men. The Mining Company of Ireland arrived in 1824 and worked the field for over sixty years, building Mardyke - the first planned mining village in Ireland - and investing in engine houses and underground drainage. The last commercial mining ended in the late 1980s. Over 500 features survive in the landscape: basset pits, chimney stacks, engine-house walls, miners' cottages. They're mapped now; the tipperarycoalmines.ie heritage project documents all of them.
The oldest image of the game
The hurley carved in stone
On the east window of Kilcooley Abbey, carved sometime in the fifteenth century, is an image of a hurley and sliotar. Scholars have called it the earliest depiction of hurling in stone anywhere in Ireland. Eight hundred years later, Gortnahoe-Glengoole GAA was winning the Tipperary Intermediate Hurling Championship. The game has barely left this parish in the intervening centuries.