Tomb - effigial, St. Francisabbey, Co. Tipperary

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Tombs & Memorials

Tomb – effigial, St. Francisabbey, Co. Tipperary

Among the carved stone monuments now sheltered within the Vicars Choral on the Rock of Cashel, one has travelled a more complicated route than most to reach its current home.

This effigial tomb, meaning a tomb bearing a sculpted likeness of the deceased on its upper face, did not originate on that great limestone outcrop at all. It began its life in the Hackett chapel of the Franciscan Friary in Cashel town, a community of friars whose physical presence in the settlement long predated its absorption into the dramatic ecclesiastical complex above.

When the Franciscan Friary was eventually demolished, the tomb was not lost. It passed instead into the grounds of the convent that subsequently occupied the friary site, preserved through what appears to have been a quiet act of institutional memory, the kind of conservation that happens not through formal decree but simply because someone thought it worth keeping. From there it made its final journey up to the Rock, where it now rests inside the Vicars Choral, a building that once housed the clergy responsible for maintaining the cathedral's musical liturgy. The Hackett name attached to the chapel suggests the tomb is connected to that family, who were significant enough to have their own dedicated space within the friary church, though the precise identity of the figure carved upon it remains a matter for closer examination of the stonework itself.

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