Graveslab, Tullaroan, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Tullaroan, Co. Kilkenny

In the archaeological record, a sixteenth-century graveslab has gone missing.

Not lost in the distant past, but lost in the way things quietly disappear from old churches over centuries of use, neglect, and renovation. The slab was last securely documented at Tullaroan church in County Kilkenny, and is now listed simply as unlocated, its whereabouts unknown.

What survives is a detailed description of a genuinely unusual object. The slab was tapering in form, divided into three carved panels arranged vertically. The uppermost showed a Calvary scene complete with a crown of thorns and the instruments of the Passion, the arma Christi, which were a common devotional motif in late medieval funerary art. Below that, in raised relief, the Virgin and Child. Below that again, a heraldic shield bearing a lion rampant. A marginal inscription ran continuously around the entire slab, beginning at the upper right corner and ending with the date 1543. The Latin text, preserved in a family memoir and cited by the ecclesiastical historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, records the deaths of James Grace of Corstown, son of Baron Grace, who died on the last day of August 1542, and his wife Ellis, who died on the thirtieth of December 1543. The slab was almost certainly commissioned after Ellis's death, bringing both commemorations together under a single stone. The Grace family were an Anglo-Norman dynasty with deep roots in Kilkenny and Tipperary, and the combination of Passion imagery, Marian devotion, and heraldry on the slab reflects the devotional and social vocabulary of Hiberno-Norman gentry in the final decades before the Reformation unsettled such traditions.

By the time Carrigan went looking for the stone in the early twentieth century, it had already vanished from the church. An illustration made from an earlier source was published by Cockerham and Harris in 2001, so the slab's appearance is not entirely lost to record, even if the object itself remains unaccounted for.

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