Graveslab, Inishlounaght, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
Every time someone steps through the west door of the Church of Ireland church at Inishlounaght, they walk across the grave of a medieval person whose name has been almost entirely worn away.
Set into the floor at the threshold, broken into two pieces and with its lower portion laid upside down, the slab has been quietly underfoot for centuries, its incised Latin inscription in Lombardic script, a formal lettering style common in medieval stonework, reading only as far as HIC IACET MA before the name dissolves into uncertainty. What follows, reconstructed tentatively as I(G?) AICIET':DS:, has resisted confident interpretation. The stonecutter's work survives; the identity of the person commemorated, for now, does not.
The slab dates from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and its original setting was the Cistercian abbey that once occupied this site on the River Suir in County Tipperary. That monastery is now gone, and the Church of Ireland building that replaced it in the nineteenth century was constructed on or very near the abbey's footprint. When the church was built, the graveslab was incorporated into the floor rather than discarded, though not with any great ceremony: the two sections are misaligned, and the lower portion, decorated with an incised cross-shaft resting on a stepped base, was placed face-down. The upper portion, measuring roughly 73 centimetres long by 69 centimetres wide, carries a four-armed cross with trefoil terminals at each end, a motif typical of high-medieval Irish funerary carving. Together the two pieces represent a single commemorative slab that has simply been reassembled, imperfectly, in a building that outlasted the institution it once served.