Wall monument - effigial, Ardnurcher, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Religious Objects

Wall monument – effigial, Ardnurcher, Co. Westmeath

In the porch of a church in Ardnurcher, Co. Westmeath, a seventeenth-century wall monument rises to four metres, filling much of the available wall space with carved stone theology and family ambition.

The Peyton memorial is not a quiet plaque or a worn floor slab; it is a full architectural composition, nearly two metres wide, with pilasters, pinnacles, a tympanum carved with the words "THE HOSPITALL OF THE SOULE", an open book labelled "THE BIBLE", a heraldic achievement in low relief, an angel blowing two trumpets from flanking clouds, and, at the base, a skull, crossed bones, and a winged hourglass. That last grouping, common in late seventeenth-century funerary carving, was a deliberate shorthand for mortality and the passage of time, intended to remind the living of what awaited them. The two demi-effigies placed on the east and west walls of the porch complete the arrangement, their arms crossed, their faces round and composed, dressed in the fashion of their era.

The inscription sets out the circumstances with considerable precision. George Peyton of Streasestoune, esquire, died on 15 March 1698 at the age of sixty-eight, having designed and contrived the monument and vault himself during his lifetime. His wife, Thomazen Peyton, née Piggot, was one of the daughters of Sir Robert Piggot of Disart in Queen's County, a connection the monument acknowledges through the impaled heraldry on the upper tablet: the Peyton arms on the dexter side, a cross engrailed on sable with a mullet in the first quarter, and the Piggot arms on the sinister, three fusils conjoined on ermine with a crescent at the centre. George did not live to see the finished work; after his death it was made and erected at the expense of one of his executors, Robert Rochford, who at the time held the offices of Speaker of the House of Commons and Attorney General of Ireland. The monument George had planned for himself and his "pious and vertuous wife" was thus realised through the patronage of one of the most prominent legal and parliamentary figures in late seventeenth-century Ireland.

The male effigy wears a shoulder-length curled wig and a pleated coat over a cravated shirt, his right hand placed over his heart, possibly holding a small book. The female figure, in a flat head-dress with a veil, wears a square-cut bodice with a diamond-shaped brooch, and may also hold a book. The detail in both figures is careful rather than grand, and the monument as a whole has the quality of something planned by the man it commemorates: deliberate, layered, and apparently unwilling to leave any theological or genealogical point unstated.

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