Architectural fragment, Leggetsrath, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Architectural fragment, Leggetsrath, Co. Kilkenny

In an Office of Public Works storage depot in Kilkenny, catalogued under the reference KD050, sits a small block of moulded limestone that probably once formed part of something considerably grander.

The fragment, measuring roughly nineteen by twenty centimetres and just eleven centimetres thick, is a square pillar base, and the pillar that once rose from it is still present, though broken off near its foot. Between the two sections, a precisely worked projecting moulding survives intact, its dimensions suggesting careful, deliberate craftsmanship rather than plain functional stonework.

The piece is thought to originate from Leggetsrath in County Kilkenny, and its style points to a Renaissance-influenced wall monument, most likely dating from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Wall monuments of this period were typically fixed to church interiors, commemorating the local gentry or ecclesiastical figures through elaborate carved compositions that borrowed from continental European decorative vocabulary. The entablature, the horizontal band of moulded stonework sitting above columns or pilasters in classical architecture, was a key element of such monuments, and this fragment may have formed part of exactly that feature. The limestone carving, though now reduced to a compact and somewhat anonymous block, retains enough detail in its convex moulding to hint at the more elaborate whole it once belonged to.

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