Graveslab, Tullaherin, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Tullaherin, Co. Kilkenny

Inside the chancel of the ruined medieval church at Tullaherin, Co. Kilkenny, a limestone graveslab lies flat against the south wall, its surface carrying an inscription that nobody has yet been able to read with any certainty.

The worn text runs along the right-hand edge of the stone, and scholars remain unsure whether it is Old Irish lettering or Norman-French in Lombardic script, the rounded, decorative letterforms common in medieval manuscript and stone carving. That ambiguity is itself a small puzzle; it places the person commemorated here at an oblique angle to the cultural and linguistic crossroads of medieval Ireland, where Gaelic and Anglo-Norman worlds overlapped and sometimes blurred together.

The slab is a substantial piece of work, nearly two metres long and tapering from sixty centimetres wide at the head to thirty-five at the foot, cut from limestone and finished with chamfered, diagonally tooled sides. Its surface is framed by a raised border, and the decoration is carved in raised relief rather than incised, giving it a legible presence even after centuries of wear. The central motif is a four-armed cross with fleur-de-lys terminals, the stylised lily-like ornament that appears frequently on high-status medieval stonework, and the shaft of the cross terminates in a further fleur-de-lys at the base. Just below the cross-head sits a knop, a small rounded projection, and from either side of the shaft beneath it spring two foliate sprigs, giving the composition a controlled, organic quality. Stylistically, the slab belongs to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, a period when such decorative programmes were well established across Ireland and Britain. It is not alone in the church; another graveslab lies immediately to its west, and two further fragments from the same general period survive elsewhere within the building, suggesting that Tullaherin was a site of some local significance for commemorative burial.

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