Wall monument, Kilvemnon, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Religious Objects

Wall monument, Kilvemnon, Co. Tipperary

In Kilvemnon graveyard in County Tipperary, a limestone plaque sits south of the old church, worn to the point where the details it once proclaimed have become little more than shadows in stone.

It is a fragment of something grander: a 17th-century wall monument, the kind that would originally have been fixed inside the church itself, commemorating a person of rank with all the formal heraldic vocabulary the period demanded.

The plaque measures roughly 69 centimetres long by 57 centimetres wide, and its shape is deliberately ceremonial. The top is round-headed, with a single scallop carved into each side, and a small rectangular projection at the summit once supported a pillar or obelisk, now long gone. At the centre, a raised coat of arms survives within a framed border. The shield is surmounted by a closed helmet shown in profile, a heraldic convention associated with the gentry rather than the higher nobility, with plumes fanning out on either side. The carving is in contoured relief, meaning the forms follow the natural curves of the composition rather than sitting flat, a technique that would have given the piece considerable presence when it was new and unweathered. What remains today is much worn, the limestone having lost much of its crispness over the intervening centuries.

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