Graveslab, Athasselabbey, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Athasselabbey, Co. Tipperary

On the floor of the chancel at Athassel Abbey, close to the eastern gable, lies a fragment of stone that rewards a second look precisely because there is so little of it left.

The slab has lost all its original edges and measures just over half a metre in length, yet what survives on its surface is deliberate and considered: a lightly incised design showing the lower portion of a cross-stem ending in a knop, that small rounded protrusion often used as a terminal ornament, accompanied by three trefoils. Some of those trefoils are worn to the point of incompleteness, and whoever carved this stone left no inscription, or at least none that anyone has been able to detect.

Athassel itself was one of the largest Augustinian priories in medieval Ireland, and the abbey complex that contains this fragment still impresses by its sheer extent, even in ruin. The graveslab belongs to the tradition of carved memorial stones common in Irish monastic settings from the medieval period onward, where decorative motifs, crosses, and foliate forms stood in for the kind of elaborate effigies found elsewhere in Europe. This particular piece was recorded by Maher in 1997, who noted its position within the chancel, the roofed eastern arm of the church where the altar stood and where burials were considered especially prestigious. That it survives at all, given its condition, is partly a matter of where it came to rest.

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