Cross-slab, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Crosses & Monuments
In the porch of St Audeon's, Dublin's oldest surviving medieval parish church, sits something that most visitors walk straight past: the lower half of a limestone slab, broken into three pieces, propped quietly against the stonework as though it has always been there.
It is a cross-slab, a carved grave marker of the kind once placed over the burial of a person of some local standing, and what survives is only the bottom portion, measuring roughly 67 centimetres in length. The top is gone entirely. What remains is enough, however, to read the stem of a cross running down the face of the stone, and at its base, a small carved animal motif whose identity is now difficult to determine with certainty.
Cross-slabs of this type are coffin-shaped, meaning they taper toward the foot end, with the sides cut at a steep inward angle, a technique known as chamfering, which gives the stone a distinctive bevelled profile. This one is limestone, and the chamfering on its sides is described as deep, suggesting a confident hand and some degree of craft. The small animal at the base is an intriguing detail; such motifs appear on medieval funerary stonework across Ireland and Britain, sometimes representing the deceased's occupation or status, sometimes carrying symbolic or devotional meaning that is no longer easy to decode. The record for this particular slab was compiled by Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the archaeological inventory in August 2012, placing it formally within the cluster of monuments associated with St Audeon's Church, recorded under the reference DU018-020075.
St Audeon's stands on Cornmarket, just off High Street in the old walled city, and the porch where the slab is kept is accessible when the church is open to visitors. The stone sits in a space that also preserves other early architectural fragments, so it is worth taking a moment to let your eyes adjust after coming in from the street before looking around at ground level. The slab is not mounted or interpreted with any great ceremony; it simply occupies its corner. The break lines running across it are clearly visible, and tracing the cross stem downward to where the animal motif sits at the foot of the stone gives a sense of how the original composition would have read, even from a fragment that is missing more than it has kept.