Graveslab, Callan, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Callan, Co. Kilkenny

On the floor of St Mary's church in Callan, County Kilkenny, a broken limestone slab lies flat near the western end of the nave, its two lives written in stone.

The lower portion is all that survives, measuring just over a metre in length and less than a centimetre shy of a metre across, but what remains carries the traces of two quite different moments in Irish memorial culture, separated by several centuries and overlapping in a way that was probably never intended.

The older layer belongs to a medieval graveslab, carved with an incised cross-shaft ending in a stepped base, a common decorative convention on ecclesiastical stonework of the period. Running along the border near the top of the slab, and continuing in a second line inside that border on both sides, is an inscription in Black Letter script, the angular Gothic lettering used widely in medieval Europe before Roman typefaces displaced it. The text is now very worn and only partially legible. At some point the slab was broken, and in the eighteenth or nineteenth century someone repurposed the fragment, almost certainly standing it upright in the ground as a gravemarker and cutting a new inscription in English into its surface. That later text begins with the words "Erected by R[obert] Com[erford] of Callan", though the remainder is no longer fully readable. The Comerfords were a notable Old English family with deep roots in County Kilkenny, which makes the reuse feel less like casual opportunism and more like a deliberate, if pragmatic, choice of material. The slab now lies prostrate again, its medieval and post-medieval inscriptions sharing the same worn face, each partially obscuring the story the other was meant to tell.

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