Graveslab, Abbeypark, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Tombs & Memorials
At Clontuskert priory in County Galway, a medieval graveslab leans against the north wall of the chancel alongside two companions, and the middle one carries a quiet puzzle within it.
Carved with a fleur-de-lis cross on its upper face and framed by an incised border running around its edges, the slab is a type familiar from late medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites, where stone markers were cut to cover the graves of clergy or wealthy patrons. What sets this particular stone apart is a note embedded in its history: it was reused in 1740. The slab itself is a substantial piece of work, 1.6 metres tall and tapering from roughly 55 centimetres wide at the top to 41 centimetres at the base, thinning as it goes from 18 millimetres down to 9. Someone, at some point in the eighteenth century, found a purpose for it again.
The priory at Clontuskert, an Augustinian house in east County Galway, provides the wider context. By 1740 the community had long since dissolved, and the buildings were in the kind of slow decline common to suppressed religious houses after the Reformation. That a graveslab was lifted and put to new use in this period is not unusual in itself; stone was a practical resource in a landscape where quarrying was laborious. What survives here is the object itself, now fixed to the chancel wall and flanked by two other slabs, one of them also late medieval and the other dating to the seventeenth century. Together they form a small, accidental sequence of funerary carving spanning several centuries, gathered into the same wall without ever having been intended to sit alongside one another.