Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
In the graveyard of St. Mary's Church at Burgagery-Lands, a limestone slab stands upright in the earth with its decorated face turned east, as was customary for Christian burial monuments.
What makes it worth pausing over is the cross carved upon it: not the simple equal-armed form common to so many Irish grave markers, but a seven-armed segmental cross, each arm finishing in a fleur-de-lis, with three horizontal bands separating the cross-head from the shaft below. The upper left corner of the slab is broken, and centuries of weathering have softened the detail, but the overall composition remains legible. The slab measures 1.3 metres in length and 0.68 metres across, though its base is buried in the ground, so its full original extent is unknown.
Along both edges of the slab runs an inscription in Black Letter, the angular Gothic script common to formal stonework of the late medieval period. Most of it has been worn beyond reading, but on the right-hand face a partial date survives: the Latin formula "Anno Domini" followed by numerals that Maher, writing in 1997, read as possibly indicating 1520, with the day of death also partially present. If that reading is correct, the slab dates from the early sixteenth century, a period when elaborate relief carving with heraldic motifs such as the fleur-de-lis was appearing on funerary monuments across Munster and Leinster. The slab sits roughly three metres north of the nave of the church, and slightly to the north-east of the nave's north-west corner, placing it in a precise relationship to the building that may once have carried more significance than is now apparent.