Graveslab, Clonsilla, Co. Dublin

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Clonsilla, Co. Dublin

Somewhere in the churchyard at Clonsilla, a seventeenth-century noblewoman lies commemorated beneath a slab that is slowly losing its ability to say so.

The graveslab marking the burial of Frances Lady Newcomen of Sutton, who died in 1687, sits recumbent on the ground to the south of the Church of Ireland building, set into a tarmacademed surface that does it no particular favours. The stone has cracked extensively, the southwest corner has been patched with concrete, and the surface itself is flaking away. What lettering remains is largely legible only where moss has settled into the carved strokes, making the inscription readable in the way that a rubbing might be, through contrast rather than clarity.

The church itself is a nineteenth-century structure, so the slab predates the building that now stands over it by well over a century. Frances Lady Newcomen was connected to Sutton, a coastal area of north County Dublin, and her memorial here in Clonsilla suggests the kind of family and estate connections that frequently placed burial monuments at some distance from a person's principal residence. The historian F. E. Ball noted the stone in his 1906 work, which remains one of the few sources to have recorded it in any detail. That a record was made at all is fortunate, given how much the inscription has deteriorated since.

The slab is not signposted or interpreted on site, and its condition means that finding the lettering requires patience and a willingness to crouch down and look carefully, particularly in raking light, when shadows settle into the carved surfaces and make the text easier to read. Morning or late afternoon visits are better for this reason. The tarmac surround makes the setting feel municipal rather than contemplative, but the stone itself, cracked and mossy and slowly dissolving back into illegibility, has an unintended gravity. It is the kind of monument that rewards attention precisely because so little has been done to make it easy.

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