Graveslab, Ballycallan, Co. Kilkenny

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Ballycallan, Co. Kilkenny

At the south-eastern corner of Ballycallan graveyard in County Kilkenny, a thin slab of stone stands upright in the earth, tilting slightly eastward as though leaning into the centuries.

It is not large, roughly eighty centimetres of exposed height and narrower than a person's shoulders, yet it carries a name. Cut into the eastern face in a Lombardic script, a style of rounded, decorative lettering common in medieval stonework, is an inscription that reads "HIC JACT SARRAMOYNATH", translated as "Here lies Sarah Moynath."

The slab belongs to a group of four tapering graveslabs clustered within the same graveyard, all of them associated with the medieval church at Ballycallan and all appearing to date from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Tapering graveslabs are a characteristic medieval form, wider at the head end and narrowing toward the foot, sometimes laid flat over a burial and sometimes, as here, planted upright. The decoration on this one is precise: a cross with fleur-de-lis terminals, those small stylised flower-tips that appear frequently in medieval ecclesiastical carving across Ireland. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905 in his substantial account of the diocese of Ossory, recorded the inscription and offered the translation, noting the slightly irregular Latin spelling. Beyond her name and her proximity to a medieval church in Kilkenny, nothing else is known about Sarah Moynath. The stone itself is the only testimony she left behind.

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