Graveslab, Athlone, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Athlone, Co. Westmeath

In a churchyard in Athlone there once lay a small graveslab that has since disappeared entirely.

Its current whereabouts are unknown, which gives it a peculiar status: a documented object that exists now only in the scholarly record, described in enough detail to be recognisable but not, apparently, in enough detail to be found.

The slab was recorded by F. J. Bigger in the early twentieth century, writing between 1901 and 1903, who noted it lying at the eastern end of the churchyard. It was a modest piece, decorated with a ringed cross set on a step, a common enough motif in Irish funerary carving, accompanied by two sets of letters: RM, almost certainly the initials of the person commemorated, and IHS, the Christogram derived from the Greek spelling of Jesus and widely used on Catholic memorial stonework from the medieval period onward. Scholars working on the site in 1985 placed it tentatively in the seventeenth century, a period when such personal grave markers became more common across Ireland as individual commemoration in stone grew more widespread among people of modest means as well as the gentry.

What makes this slab quietly notable is precisely its absence. Objects like this are lost all the time, repositioned during churchyard tidying, built into walls, broken up, or simply buried under shifting ground. The documentation survives; the stone does not, or at least cannot be confirmed to. It is a reminder that the archaeological record is full of things that were seen once, written down, and never found again.

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Pete F
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