Graveslab, Town Parks, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Town Parks, Co. Tipperary

Built into the inner face of a boundary wall on the west side of a Church of Ireland church in Tipperary town, there is a small wedge-shaped fragment of limestone that most people walking past would never notice.

It measures roughly 44 centimetres in length, tapering from 40 centimetres wide at the base to 27 centimetres at the top, and across its face runs a Latin inscription that names specific people, in a specific family line, from a world that has largely been erased from the fabric of the town around it.

The inscription reads: HIC JACET JACOB LUDLOWE FILIUS BENJAMINI LUDLOW. W… FILIUS EIUS, which translates as "Here lies Jacob Ludlowe, son of Benjamin Ludlow, W… his son," with the third name now lost to damage or wear. The slab is a survivor of the medieval church of St. Nicholas of Myra that once occupied this ground. That church appears to have stood until around 1813, when it was demolished and replaced by the current Church of Ireland building. The graveslab, rather than being discarded, was incorporated into the new structure's western boundary wall, where it remains. The Ludlow name is an English one, and its presence in a medieval Irish church inscription points to the layers of settlement and administration that shaped towns like Tipperary during the late medieval period. Latin memorial inscriptions of this kind, beginning with the formula hic jacet, "here lies," were standard across Catholic Europe from the early medieval period onward, and their survival in fragmentary form is often a matter of accident as much as preservation.

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