Architectural fragment, Corbally, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Ritual/Ceremonial
Beside the road between Fethard and Drangan in County Tipperary, set into the entrance wall of a private house, there is a piece of stonework that belongs to a building no longer standing, and possibly no longer remembered.
A medieval limestone door jamb, measuring roughly 63 centimetres high and 54 centimetres wide, has been reused as part of a gateway on the western side of the entrance. It is the kind of quiet recycling that happened constantly across the Irish countryside, as older structures were robbed for dressed stone, their fabric dispersed into farmyards, field walls, and domestic thresholds.
The jamb itself rewards close attention. A door jamb is the vertical stone forming one side of a doorway, and this example carries a double external chamfer, a angled cutting of the stone's edge that reduces its sharpness and gives a doorway a sense of frame and depth. Here there are two such chamfers, one roughly six centimetres wide and one eight centimetres, both dressed using vertical punch tooling within plain flat margins, a technique characteristic of medieval craft masonry. On the interior face there is a rebate, a stepped recess six centimetres deep, which would originally have held the door itself or its frame. The medieval building it came from is not known.