Graveslab, Baile Chláir, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Baile Chláir, Co. Galway

At the friary of Baile Chláir, a graveslab roughly two metres long carries two inscriptions from two different centuries, one carved directly over the other.

That kind of reuse was not uncommon in Irish ecclesiastical sites, where older stonework was pressed back into service when convenient, but what makes this slab quietly peculiar is that nobody can now say exactly where it is.

The slab was recorded by Bradley and Dunne in 1992, measuring 1.92 metres in length and 0.84 metres in width. They dated it to the seventeenth century and noted that in 1867 a new inscription was cut across the earlier one, effectively overwriting whatever text or decoration had been placed there two hundred years before. What survives of the older lettering reads as a prayer for the souls of two individuals, James and Matthew, their surnames lost to damage or obscurity. The 1867 cutting would have been a practical decision at the time, a family or community reusing a substantial piece of dressed stone rather than commissioning something new. Gravestones of this kind, flat memorial slabs laid horizontally or set against a wall, were a standard form of commemoration in Irish friaries and parish churchyards from the medieval period onward, and their tendency to be moved, reused, or built into later fabric is precisely why so many end up unaccounted for.

When the site was inspected in June 2018, the slab could not be located. It may have been moved, covered, or incorporated into later construction in a way that obscures it from view. Anyone visiting the friary at Baile Chláir with a particular interest in the stone should be prepared for the possibility that it remains out of sight, its doubled inscription waiting somewhere underfoot or behind a wall.

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