Graveslab, Tinvoher, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Tinvoher, Co. Tipperary

On the floor of a ruined chancel in County Tipperary, two graveslabs dated 1643 and 1644 are decorated with fleur-de-lis motifs, the French heraldic lily more commonly associated with royal courts than with burial grounds in rural Ireland.

They lie alongside five late medieval graveslabs and an open stone sarcophagus, the kind of lidless coffin-shaped trough that occasionally survives in old ecclesiastical sites and raises more questions than it answers about who it once held and why the covering is long gone.

The church at Tinvoher, a nave and chancel structure now deep in ivy, was already an established ecclesiastical presence by the early fourteenth century, appearing in the taxation of the Diocese of Cashel in 1302. A barrel-vaulted tower was at some point added onto the eastern end of the chancel, a feature that gives the ruin an unusual profile. The site sits on an east-facing slope within a small cluster of monuments: a ringwork to the west and a tower house to the east. A ringwork is an early medieval defensive enclosure defined by a bank and ditch rather than a raised mound, and its proximity here suggests the site had a long history of occupation before the church was built. A single further late medieval graveslab lies in the south-east angle of the nave near the chancel arch, slightly separated from the rest, as though placed as an afterthought or belonging to a different tradition of commemoration within the same walls.

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Pete F
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