Graveslab, Ballyneill, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Ballyneill, Co. Tipperary

A medieval graveslab lying on the floor of a ruined church is not unusual in Ireland, but most carry only a cross or a name worn to near-illegibility.

The slab at Kilmurry church in Ballyneill is different. Across its surviving lower portion, carved in careful relief, is a full programme of Arma Christi, the instruments of the Passion, arranged on either side of a stylised cross-shaft as though laid out for inspection. These devotional images, common enough in continental manuscript art and church sculpture, appear only rarely on Irish funerary slabs, which makes this fragment, even in its damaged state, quietly remarkable.

The slab now lies recumbent at the east end of Kilmurry church, and only the lower section has survived, measuring roughly 1.19 metres in length and just over 0.93 metres across the base. A raised black-letter inscription runs in a marginal band around the edge, but the text is severely worn; the only legible passage reads -S VXOR ELLFNA, a fragment suggesting the deceased may have been identified as someone's wife, "vxor" being the Latin word for wife. The carved imagery is more legible than the lettering. On the right-hand side of the cross-shaft, reading downward, are the jug and basin used by Pilate when he washed his hands of Christ's condemnation, then Peter's sword alongside the ear he severed in the Garden of Gethsemane, and finally a hammer and pincers gripping three nails. On the left-hand side stands the scourging pillar draped with robes and topped by the cock that crowed at Peter's denial, accompanied by two flails of knotted cord, one unidentified object that may be a scourge, and near the base, a pair of feet and further faded imagery that most likely represents the hands. The cross-shaft itself rises from a simple curving calvary mount, the low mound associated with Golgotha. Taken together, the composition asks the viewer to meditate on the sequence of Christ's suffering, object by object, as a form of prayer for the person buried beneath.

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