Graveslab, Burgage More, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Burgage More, Co. Wicklow

A medieval graveslab that spent centuries embedded in a church wall is an unusual enough object, but one whose whereabouts were genuinely unknown for years before being quietly rediscovered in a field corner adds a particular layer of strangeness to an already overlooked site.

The slab at Burgage More is a fragment of gently tapering granite, measuring just over a metre in length and up to sixty centimetres wide, with traces of a cross-shaft and arms carved in relief still visible on its surface. That it was built into the fabric of the church as a construction material at some point, rather than left to mark a grave, suggests it was already considered old or redundant by the time it was pressed into that secondary use.

The slab came to wider attention in 1993, when a man named Paddy Healy described three graveslabs that had been uncovered by the collapse of the church tower at Burgage in 1987. This particular fragment, one of the three, was recorded as having been reused in the church's construction, and its subsequent location was listed as unknown. The site at Burgage More includes a towerhouse, the kind of fortified tower typical of late medieval Ireland, and it was roughly ten metres to the north-west of that structure that the slab was eventually relocated. Whether it had been moved there after the tower's collapse, or had simply been overlooked in earlier surveys, is not recorded. Christiaan Corlett documented the slab and its companions in a 2003 publication, giving this particular fragment the designation Slab 6 and situating it within the broader archaeology of the Burgage complex.

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