Graveslab, Leixlip, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Tombs & Memorials
Sometime in the fifteenth century, a medieval graveslab stopped being a graveslab. Rather than remaining in the ground or standing upright as a memorial, it was flipped on its side and set into a doorway as a lintel, and there it has remained ever since, carrying foot traffic overhead instead of marking a burial below.
The slab sits in the tower of Leixlip church, Co. Kildare, reused at first-floor level as a lintel for a doorway in what is a fifteenth-century structure. It is a rectangular piece of stone, measuring at least 0.77 metres in length, 0.2 metres wide, and 0.18 metres thick. Despite its humble new function, the decorative carving on its face remains legible: worked in low relief, the design features a cross built from two broken circles, an expanded rectangular knop with a round terminal, and a cross-stem. The knop, a boss or raised lump used to articulate the junction of cross arms, is a detail found on a particular tradition of Irish medieval grave slabs, giving some sense of the original monument's ambition, modest though the slab's dimensions are. The specific date of the slab's carving is not recorded, but its incorporation into a fifteenth-century tower suggests it was already old, or at least surplus to requirements, by the time the tower was built or modified.