Graveslab, Moorstown, Co. Tipperary

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Moorstown, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the crossing-tower of Mora church in Moorstown, County Tipperary, a medieval graveslab lies embedded on its side in the ground, only half of it visible to anyone who thinks to look down.

The slab has been repurposed, in effect, as floor, which means the decoration carved into its upper face, a four-armed cross with trefoil heads formed from double incised lines, a small circular knop beneath the cross-head, and a narrow incised shaft, is not quite where you would expect to find it, and not quite how you would expect to see it.

The limestone slab tapers along its length, measures just over a metre long and is broken towards the base, suggesting it has had a rough passage through the centuries. Along its left-hand edge runs an inscription in Lombardic script, the rounded, somewhat heavy letterforms common in medieval Europe from roughly the eleventh to the fourteenth century and frequently used on monumental stonework and manuscripts. Only occasional letters remain legible. The combination of that script with the particular style of the incised cross points to a date somewhere in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The slab is not alone in this respect: four other gravestabs of comparable character survive within or close to the church, suggesting that Mora was once home to a small concentration of medieval funerary carving, most of it from the same general period.

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Pete F
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