Wall monument, Glebe, Co. Kerry

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Religious Objects

Wall monument, Glebe, Co. Kerry

Inside Kilcummin church in Glebe, Co. Kerry, a round-headed stone monument has been set upright into the south wall, bedded into a patch of rough red brick that sits directly atop the cut-limestone slab of an older, larger tomb.

The stone itself, roughly 84 centimetres tall and 60 centimetres wide, is cracked diagonally across its centre, and a fragment broken from the upper left corner has been pieced back into place. The coat of arms carved onto its face has weathered to the point of being nearly illegible, yet the motto beneath it remains readable: "Boutes en avant", a French phrase meaning "push forward" or "onward".

The inscription on the stone carries an odd doubling of time. At the top it declares "This is the Barry's armes 1666", anchoring the heraldic carving to the mid-seventeenth century, yet the epitaph below commemorates a woman who died nearly a century later. The deceased is identified as Mrs Jeane Barry, otherwise Leader, wife of Mr Richard Barry of Killarney, who died on the second day of February 1760 at the age of thirty-two. The surname "otherwise Leader" reflects an older Irish naming convention by which a woman's birth surname was preserved alongside her married name. The Barrys were a Hiberno-Norman family with a long presence in Munster, and the reuse of a 1666 armorial stone for a 1760 burial suggests the monument was adapted, perhaps the arms had been carved for an earlier generation and the commemorative text added when Jeane Barry was interred. The red brick surround in which the stone now sits is itself a later intervention, built over the limestone tomb slab, with the masonry on the north wall of the tomb repointed at some subsequent point, layers of repair accumulated over the centuries on a single modest memorial.

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Pete F
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