Graveslab, Ballymore Eustace, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Tombs & Memorials
In the graveyard at Ballymore Eustace, just north of the ruins of a medieval church, a small granite slab stands partly buried in the ground, easy to overlook and easier still to misread as simply old stonework. What it actually is, on closer inspection, is a grave marker of considerable age: a low, gently tapering slab, earthfast and erect, carrying on its eastern face a deeply incised Latin cross. The slab is modest in every dimension, standing only thirty centimetres above ground, roughly half a metre wide, and fourteen centimetres thick, yet the deliberate, confident cutting of that cross suggests it was made by someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
The Latin cross form, a vertical shaft intersecting a shorter horizontal arm above the midpoint, is one of the oldest Christian grave-marking conventions in Ireland, and slabs of this kind are often impossible to date with precision. This example is recorded in Corlett's 2003 survey as Slab 4 in the Ballymore Eustace group, appearing alongside other slabs from the same site. The church ruins nearby, now roofless and reduced, give some sense of the wider medieval context from which the marker comes, a small parish landscape where the graveyard continued to accumulate the dead long after the building itself fell out of use.