Architectural fragment, Patrickswell, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Architectural fragment, Patrickswell, Co. Tipperary

Inside the church at Patrickswell in County Tipperary, set into the base of the east gable wall in concrete, are a number of old carved stone fragments that seem almost too easily overlooked.

Among them is a label stop, the decorative terminal piece used to finish off the hood moulding that runs above a door or window arch, carved with two fleur-de-lys in raised relief. It is a small, precise piece of ornamental stonework, and the fact that it ended up embedded in a wall base rather than in its original architectural position says something about the long, untidy afterlife of medieval church buildings.

Label stops of this kind were common features of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, often carved with foliage, animal heads, or heraldic motifs. The fleur-de-lys, a stylised lily form associated across medieval Europe with religious and royal iconography, appears here in a modest but accomplished rendering. The fragment is situated close to the north wall of the church interior, just south of another recorded feature on the same site. The stone is partially broken, which makes a full reading of the original piece difficult, but enough survives to identify the carving clearly. When the fragment was incorporated into the fabric of the gable base, it was almost certainly recycled from an earlier structure or from a phase of the church that was subsequently altered or demolished.

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