Graveslab, Ballyneill, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Ballyneill, Co. Tipperary

Inside the ruins of Kilmurry church in Ballyneill, a stone slab leans upright against the south wall, propped there like a thing that has outlasted its original purpose.

It is only a fragment, the upper portion of what was once a full graveslab, roughly eighty centimetres wide and sixty-seven centimetres long. What makes it quietly arresting is the combination of near-illegibility and stubborn persistence: carved script runs along its margin in raised black letter, that angular, compressed style of lettering common to formal inscriptions of the early modern period, and though much of it has worn away, enough survives to suggest that someone once invested considerable care in its making.

The cross-head carved into the slab is badly faded, but the terminals of its arms can still be made out as fleur-de-lys forms, a decorative motif with a long history in ecclesiastical stonework. The marginal inscription, read from the top right corner, produces a sequence of letters, PACPRILIPOSVIP???XM, where three characters are now lost entirely. The text terminates on the same side with what appears to be the date 1634, followed by the word SIBI, a Latin term meaning "for himself" or "for oneself", commonly used in memorial inscriptions to indicate that a person commissioned the stone during their own lifetime rather than having it erected posthumously. The first part of the inscription almost certainly contained a name and perhaps a dedicatory formula, but too much has eroded to reconstruct it with any confidence.

The slab is set within the fabric of Kilmurry church, and the fact that it stands upright against the wall rather than lying flat suggests it has been moved or repositioned at some point, perhaps when the building fell out of use. It is the kind of object that rewards close attention in poor light, when the raking angle of sun or shadow picks out the shallow relief of the lettering more clearly than a bright midday visit would allow.

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