Graveslab, Newtown, Co. Kilkenny

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Newtown, Co. Kilkenny

A graveslab that spent centuries buried under a Kilkenny graveyard is not, on its own, unusual.

What makes this one worth pausing over is the detail that survived: an eight-armed floriated cross, its petalled arms incised into the stone with careful precision, enclosed within a double-lined circle, the shaft dropping to a neat stepped base. The upper and central portion of the cross-head is now missing, but even in its damaged state the slab measures over a metre in length and nearly sixty centimetres across at the base, broad enough to suggest it once marked someone of at least local consequence.

The slab is associated with the medieval church of Newtown Earley in County Kilkenny, a site that gives few clues about the people who once worshipped and were buried there. It came to light during a clean-up of the graveyard between 1985 and 1987, when a considerable number of graveslabs were uncovered together, their existence largely forgotten until that point. The finds were documented by R. Harte in the Old Kilkenny Review in 1987. On stylistic grounds, this particular slab dates to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, placing it in the later medieval period when floriated crosses, with their flowing decorative arms derived from plant forms, were a common choice for funerary carving across Ireland and Britain. The slabs uncovered during the clean-up are now lying within the interior of the church itself, removed from the ground but not yet given any more formal setting.

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Pete F
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