Inscribed slab, Freneystown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Religious Objects

Inscribed slab, Freneystown, Co. Kilkenny

A flat stone carved with a cross, found lying against an earthen bank in a small upland graveyard in County Kilkenny, is no longer in the field where it was discovered.

The slab, uncovered in 1950 along the bank enclosing the remains of an early medieval church, was removed to the National Museum of Ireland, leaving the site itself with almost nothing visible above ground. The graveyard it came from is small and square-shaped, and the church it once marked, located in the graveyard's south-western quadrant, has left no trace whatsoever.

The place is tied to St. Scoithin, a sixth-century monk who is said to have established a hermitage here in the early medieval period. The Irish name for the site, Tigh Scoithin, meaning Scoithin's house, survived long enough to appear on the 1900 Ordnance Survey map as Tiscoffin Church. Alongside the vanished church and its graveyard, a holy well dedicated to the saint, known as St. Scoheen's Well, lies roughly sixty metres to the west. Local tradition recorded in the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey letters, later published by O'Flanagan in 1930, describes seven flagstones within the graveyard, partly buried under grass and earth, said to cover the graves of seven bishops, identified as the seven sons of Scoithin. Whether those stones are still there beneath the soil is unclear; the description itself has an air of something half-remembered and half-lost.

The setting is an upland river valley, positioned at the eastern end of a low ridge with a steep drop to the river valley on the eastern and northern sides. The cross-inscribed slab, a simple carved stone of the kind used across early Christian Ireland to mark graves or sacred boundaries, is now held in Dublin. What remains at Freneystown is the quiet geometry of the graveyard, the well, and the earthen bank that once held the stone in place.

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