Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
In St. Mary's graveyard in Burgagery-Lands, County Tipperary, a small slab of red sandstone stands upright in the earth, most of it still buried, with only its upper portion visible.
What that portion reveals, however, repays close attention. Carved in raised relief is a three-armed cross, each arm terminating in a fleur-de-lis, the familiar heraldic lily form used widely in medieval decorative work. Where the arms meet, a plain cross sits within a lozenge, the diamond shape formed by the angles of the surrounding frame. At the top of the shaft there is a barred-knop, a small decorative boss or knob with a horizontal bar across it, a detail that speaks to the refined stoneworking conventions of its era. The slab itself measures just 56 centimetres high by 54 wide and 13 centimetres thick, with gently rounded top edges, its proportions modest but its carving considered.
The stone is thought to date from the late thirteenth or fourteenth century, a period when grave markers of this kind were becoming more elaborate across Ireland, reflecting both continental Gothic influence and the growing investment of Anglo-Norman and Hiberno-Norman families in permanent funerary commemoration. The red sandstone is a local material, geologically characteristic of parts of Tipperary, and its warm colour would once have distinguished the slab sharply from the surrounding grass and soil. The slab sits just to the north-west of the north-east angle of St. Michael's Chapel, within a graveyard that also contains the remains of that earlier chapel structure. How much of the slab's decoration continues below ground remains unknown, since the lower portion has never been excavated or fully recorded.