Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the organ of Holy Trinity Church of Ireland in Fethard, County Tipperary, a seventeenth-century graveslab is slowly disappearing from view.

The limestone fragment, only a small portion of which is currently accessible, slides under the wooden housing of the organ and may extend further still beneath the instrument and a plinth to its west. What remains visible measures just 28 centimetres by 17 centimetres, a border fragment carrying a Latin inscription in Black Letter script, the formal gothic lettering common to funerary monuments of the period. The word HACKET is legible.

The church itself occupies the nave of the medieval parish church of St John the Baptist, a building with deep roots in Fethard's ecclesiastical history, and the graveslab lies in the floor near the north wall towards the eastern end of that nave, now the organ room. A transcription recorded by Brennan in the 1860s suggests this is the tomb of Patricius Hackett, who died on the 7th of March 1675. The inscription, as Brennan read it, states that Thomas Hackett, Patrick's brother, had the stone made in 1680, five years after the burial. That five-year gap between a death and the commissioning of a memorial was not unusual; funerary monuments were expensive objects, and families sometimes waited before marking a grave in lasting stone. The Hackett slab lies less than a metre from another graveslab commemorating Ann and Peter Cooke, suggesting this corner of the floor once served as something of a memorial precinct for Fethard's propertied families.

The fragment's current situation is a quiet illustration of how history accumulates in layered and sometimes awkward ways. A medieval church becomes a Church of Ireland building, a nave becomes an organ room, and a seventeenth-century monument to a man named Patrick Hackett ends up largely inaccessible beneath a musical instrument, visible but unreachable, its full extent unknown.

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