Headstone, Great Island, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Religious Objects

Headstone, Great Island, Co. Wexford

A thin wedge of schist, barely 84 centimetres tall and tapering from 30 to 25 centimetres wide, managed to confuse scholars for years by appearing to be two entirely different things depending on which side you looked at.

On one face, a gravestone inscription memorialising someone with the initials MB, who died in March 1763 at the age of 72. On the other, what was long catalogued as a sheela-na-gig, the enigmatic carved female figures found on Irish churches and castles whose exact purpose remains debated, though they are generally understood as apotropaic images, intended to ward off evil. The stone was unearthed in the gardens of Kilmokea House on Great Island, near Campile in County Wexford, and presumed to have originated in the adjacent cemetery.

For some time the carving was treated as a genuine, if crude and atypical, sheela-na-gig. Scholar Freitag described it in 2004 as a figure defined by rough grooves, with an American-football-shaped head lacking facial features, connected to the torso by a deep hole approximately four centimetres across, a peculiarity shared with only one other known sheela, at Seir Kieran in County Offaly. The figure has angular shoulders, two small drilled holes suggesting breasts, straight arms reaching toward the genital area, and legs splayed without feet. Later re-examination revised that reading considerably. The "sheela" is now understood to be a sliver of a headstone whose reverse carried a crude hourglass, the kind of memento mori, a carved symbol reminding the viewer of mortality, common on Irish grave markers of the period. The grooves describing a human form appear to be an adaptation of that hourglass shape rather than an independently conceived figure. What looked like a woman turns out to be, more probably, the remains of a death symbol worked into vaguely anthropomorphic lines. The stone is now held in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, where it sits as a small, genuinely ambiguous object at the intersection of folk carving, funerary tradition, and centuries of interpretive disagreement.

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