Architectural fragment, Emly, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Set into the north-east gable of a community hall in Emly, a small fragment of dressed stone is doing two jobs at once, and neither of them is the one it was carved for.
The upper portion of an ogee-headed window, measuring roughly half a metre across, it now serves as the head of a makeshift stoup, a small basin for holy water, hollowed into the thickness of the wall. The window itself is long gone; only this carved remnant survives, repurposed and quietly embedded in a building that was itself once something else.
The fragment dates to the sixteenth or seventeenth century and shows considerable craft. The opening is chamfered, meaning its edges are cut at an angle to reduce their sharpness, and the spandrels, the triangular spaces between the curve of the arch and its surrounding frame, are cusped in a decorative fashion typical of late medieval ecclesiastical or high-status secular work. A chamfered hood moulding, some sixty centimetres long, runs above it, its surface dressed with punch tooling, a technique that leaves a regularly pitted texture on the stone face. Where exactly it originated is uncertain. It may have been salvaged from Emly's medieval cathedral, which was a place of considerable ecclesiastical importance as the seat of one of Ireland's earliest bishoprics. Alternatively, it could be a remnant of one of the castles known to have existed within Emly but whose precise locations have never been established. The building it now occupies, Halla Naomh Ailbhe, was formerly the Roman Catholic church, and the fragment was likely incorporated during one of the building's earlier phases, finding a secondary function as the architectural surround for a devotional niche.
The hall sits within the village of Emly, and the fragment can be seen in the north-east gable wall. It is easy to overlook, particularly given that it no longer reads as a window at all, but as a slightly unusual stone surround to a shallow recess. The ogee curve at the top, a double S-shaped arch form associated with Gothic and late medieval work, is the clearest indication that this stone once belonged to a building of considerably more ambition than the one it currently inhabits.