Tomb - chest tomb, Gorey Corporation Lands, Co. Wexford

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Tombs & Memorials

Tomb – chest tomb, Gorey Corporation Lands, Co. Wexford

In the old graveyard attached to the parish church of Gorey, County Wexford, a stone chest tomb sits with an inscription in two languages carved in relief on its western end-stone.

One face addresses the reader in English, the other in Latin, a small detail that gestures toward the divided world its occupant inhabited and the ecclesiastical rank he held.

The tomb belongs to Archbishop Ram, who died in 1634. A chest tomb of this kind is essentially a solid rectangular box of masonry, raised above ground level, sometimes covering a burial vault below rather than marking a simple grave. In this case, the vault beneath the structure was briefly opened around 1909 and then resealed. The tomb itself is modest in scale, measuring roughly 1.85 metres long, 0.95 metres wide, and 0.75 metres high, set within a rectangular walled graveyard that once enclosed the parish church of Gorey. The church and graveyard occupy a defined plot bounded by masonry walls, and the tomb-chest has remained within that enclosure, largely undisturbed, for nearly four centuries.

The bilingual inscription is the detail most worth seeking out. Raised lettering in both English and Latin on a single end-stone is unusual enough to reward a close look, and the contrast between the two languages on one small surface gives a sense of the dual registers, ecclesiastical Latin and the vernacular English of early seventeenth-century Ireland, in which a man of Ram's standing would have operated and expected to be remembered.

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