Architectural fragment, Clomantagh, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Between tidy preservation and quiet dispersal, a collection of medieval cut stones at Clomantagh occupies an odd kind of limbo.
Some sit within the graveyard where they were found; others were moved into the field next door, where they remain, stranded a short distance from the church they once belonged to.
The stones are associated with the 13th-century church at Clomantagh in County Kilkenny, a medieval structure whose graveyard continued in use long after the building itself fell into ruin. During a clean-up of the graveyard in the 1990s, workers uncovered a substantial quantity of dressed and cut stonework, the kind of carefully shaped masonry that would have formed window surrounds, doorways, or decorative mouldings in a church of that period. The decision of what to do with it all was apparently made in a practical rather than archival spirit: some pieces stayed put, others were simply shifted to the adjacent field. The result is an informal scatter of architectural fragments, separated from their original context and from one another, with no clear arrangement to suggest how they once fitted together.