Graveslab, Ballynaclogh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Ballynaclogh, Co. Tipperary

Against the inner face of the east gable of a ruined medieval parish church in County Tipperary, a broken graveslab leans quietly against the stonework.

Only the top half survives, measuring roughly 73 centimetres long and 43 centimetres wide, with a pointed upper end and a thickness of about 16 centimetres. What makes it worth pausing over is the decoration carved into its face: a quatrefoil cross formed by four incised rings, rising above a twin-line shaft with a small circular knop, a rounded protrusion, sitting just below the cross-head. The four-ring motif is the unusual part. It is rare enough that scholars working on English material have identified it as an early form in the broader development of cross-slabs, one that pre-dates crosses formed with broken rings and is generally placed in the late twelfth to thirteenth century.

The slab sits within the ruins of Ballynaclogh's nave and chancel church, itself occupying the eastern quadrant of a rectangular graveyard immediately south-east of a nineteenth-century Protestant church, the two buildings marking, in their proximity, several centuries of shifting religious life on the same ground. The pointed shape of the slab connects it to a comparable example in Twomileborris graveyard, also in Tipperary, and the cross type finds a cousin of sorts at St. Mary's Church in New Ross, County Wexford, where a head slab bearing a cross of four broken rings has been dated to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Researchers have also suggested the Ballynaclogh slab may belong to a grouping of floriated cross-slabs, a type characterised by decorative, plant-like cross forms, whose finest Tipperary examples are preserved at Fethard's Holy Trinity Church. Weighing the evidence of the ring motif against those comparisons, the stone may well date from the thirteenth century rather than the fourteenth, though the question remains open.

The slab is visible within the church ruin, propped against the east gable wall. A 3D model has been made available online at skfb.ly/oxBy6, which allows the carved detail to be examined more closely than the physical conditions of the site might always permit.

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