Graveslab, Town Parks, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Town Parks, Co. Tipperary

Mortared into the interior face of a boundary wall, on the western side of a Tipperary town, is a fragment of limestone roughly the size of a sheet of notepaper.

It is easy to miss, and easier still to walk past without realising what it is: what remains of a graveslab, its Latin inscription only partially legible, commemorating someone who died in 1637.

The slab is a survivor from the medieval church of St. Nicholas of Myra, a dedication that places it within a tradition of parish churches named for the fourth-century bishop of Myra whose cult spread widely through medieval Europe. That church apparently remained standing until around 1813, when it was demolished to make way for a Church of Ireland building. The graveslab fragment, measuring approximately 0.3 metres by 0.37 metres, was not discarded but built into the southern boundary wall, where it has remained ever since. The inscription, carved in raised plain script, is a partial Latin epitaph of the kind common to post-Reformation Irish grave markers. The legible portions read: HIC JACET, meaning "here lies", followed by a name that survives only in fragments, and a death date corresponding to 1637. The gaps in the text are substantial; lacunae interrupt the name, the day of death, and the closing formula, leaving the identity of the person commemorated tantalizingly incomplete.

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