Graveslab, Town Parks, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
Built into the internal face of a boundary wall on the west side of a Tipperary town, a carved graveslab fragment survives from what was once the medieval church of St Nicholas of Myra.
It is not displayed in any museum or marked with any particular ceremony; it simply sits there, absorbed into the masonry, carrying a Latin inscription that trails off into illegibility on both ends.
The slab, measuring roughly 0.78 metres by 0.6 metres, preserves the upper portion of what was once a larger memorial. Its decoration follows a scheme common to post-Reformation Irish funerary carving: a central IHS monogram, an abbreviation of the name of Jesus drawn from the Greek, with the I and S worked in interlace. Rising from the bar of the H is a four-armed cross with trefoil terminals, the three-lobed ends that appear frequently in ecclesiastical stonework of the period, set on a curving calvary mount, the stylised representation of the hill of Golgotha. Flanking the composition are a sun on the right and a crescent moon on the left, symbols associated with the crucifixion scene. Around the edge, a raised marginal inscription in plain Latin script begins "HIC JACET GUALTERUS SEIX DE CAR" and ends, after an unclear middle section, with the fragmentary letters "RINABU ILERQUAE". Interior lettering and a date, either 1640 or 1641, are also present. The church to which this slab belonged, dedicated to St Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop whose cult spread widely through medieval Europe, appears to have survived until around 1813, when it was demolished and replaced by a Church of Ireland building. The graveslab was not lost in that process; it was simply reused, pressed into the wall where it has remained ever since.