Graveslab, Tubbrid, Co. Tipperary

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Tubbrid, Co. Tipperary

At Tubbrid in County Tipperary, a graveslab has been pressed into service as a building component, a quiet act of recycling that says a good deal about how communities once regarded the materials around them.

The slab, made of limestone and carved with an incised cross within an incised border, now sits not in the ground but overhead, repurposed as the lintel above a small circular window set into the east gable of the local mortuary chapel. An oculus, as such a round window is known, was a common feature in ecclesiastical architecture, often placed to catch the light of the rising sun. Here, the frame for that opening is itself a fragment of funerary stonework, its original purpose quietly absorbed into the fabric of the building.

The chapel stands at the eastern end of the graveyard at Tubbrid, and the graveslab forms part of what is called an embrasure, the splayed recess in the wall that holds the window. Whoever placed it there recognised a piece of flat, dressed limestone and used it where it fit, without necessarily advertising the decision. The incised decoration on the stone is still visible, a cross contained within a bordered frame, the kind of simple but deliberate carving associated with early Christian or medieval grave markers in Ireland. Elsewhere in the same graveyard, a separately recorded graveslab dates to the seventeenth century, which gives some sense of the site's long continuity as a burial place, even if the reused lintel stone cannot be dated with precision from its current position alone.

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