Inscribed slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Religious Objects
Set into the interior north wall of Toureen Peakaun church in County Tipperary, roughly three and a half metres from the east gable, is a fragment of stone so small it would be easy to overlook entirely.
It measures approximately nine centimetres high and twenty-five centimetres wide, and across its visible face runs a fragmentary incised inscription, the letters taking up most of the surviving piece. What the full slab once looked like, and what the complete text once said, remains unknown. Only this fragment survives, and it carries its partial message in silence.
The stone came to light during an excavation in 1944, recorded by Duignan and subsequently noted by Macalister in 1949. Scholars Okasha and Forsyth, writing in 2001, catalogued it as Toureen Peacaun 33, describing it as a fragment of a slab of unknown form with a text incised on its face. Inscribed slabs of this kind are associated with early medieval ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, where they typically commemorated the dead or marked sacred ground, though without a legible complete text this stone keeps its original purpose at arm's length. The church at Toureen Peakaun is itself a site of considerable age, and the incorporation of the fragment into the wall suggests it was recognised as significant enough to preserve even as the building around it was modified over the centuries.