Armorial plaque (present location), Meldrum, Co. Tipperary

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Estate Features

Armorial plaque (present location), Meldrum, Co. Tipperary

Set into a recess above a doorway at Meldrum House in County Tipperary is a limestone plaque that carries a date of 1622, yet sits within a building probably constructed later in the same century.

That small chronological mismatch is the first clue that the stone did not begin its life where it now rests. Measuring 0.67 metres high and 0.88 metres wide, it bears a heraldic shield divided vertically, a format known in heraldry as per pale, meaning the shield is split down the centre to display the arms of two families side by side. On the right half, the Sall family arms show the antlers of a stag laid horizontally, with a portcullis above; on the left, a lion passant guardant. Beneath the shield, the initials G S and M C identify the couple whose union the plaque commemorates.

Those initials almost certainly belong to Geoffrey Sall and his wife Margaret Corcran. Geoffrey died in 1622, the very year carved into the stone, and a graveslab inscribed to both of them survives in the graveyard of the Church of Ireland Cathedral in Cashel, roughly confirming the identification. The plaque is thought to have originated at Meldrum Castle, an early seventeenth-century fortified house that stands approximately 400 metres to the east of the present building. By 1640, the castle was recorded as the property of James Sall, probably Geoffrey and Margaret's son, suggesting the family retained the estate at least into the middle of that turbulent century. At some point, the carved stone was moved and reset into Meldrum House, where it has remained, slightly out of context but still legible, preserving in heraldic shorthand a marriage, a family name, and a precise year that coincides with one partner's death.

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