Architectural fragment, Leggetsrath, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Architectural fragment, Leggetsrath, Co. Kilkenny

In an Office of Public Works depot in Kilkenny, a small piece of cut stone sits in storage, catalogued and photographed but otherwise out of sight.

It came from Leggetsrath, a townland in County Kilkenny, and though it measures barely twenty-one centimetres tall, it carries on its surface the unmistakable marks of a medieval or early post-medieval mason's hand.

The fragment is a jambstone, meaning it once formed part of a door or window opening, specifically one of the vertical side pieces that framed the aperture. What makes even a modest piece like this worth recording is the detail of its tooling: both of its surviving faces are chamfered, that is, cut at an oblique angle rather than left square, each chamfer running to a consistent width of around five and a half centimetres. That kind of deliberate shaping was standard practice in dressed stonework of the medieval period, softening the hard right angle of a frame and giving the opening a more finished appearance. The stone itself is small enough to hold, at roughly twenty-three centimetres wide and nine centimetres deep, which suggests it was probably part of a modest structure rather than a grand building, though what that structure was, and when it stood, the fragment does not say.

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