Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
In the graveyard of St. Mary's at Burgagery-Lands, there is a graveslab doing something a graveslab should never do: it has been put back into the ground upside down.
Measuring roughly 78 centimetres above the surface and 67 centimetres wide, the stone is not lying forgotten in a corner but has been deliberately inserted, face-down, into the very ground it was meant to mark. Whether this was carelessness during a later burial, or some more deliberate act of reuse, is not recorded.
The slab dates to 1643, placing it in one of the more turbulent decades in Irish history, just before the upheavals of the Cromwellian wars reshaped land ownership and communities across Tipperary and beyond. The inscribed face, now facing downward, bears the initials A.P. and B.K., though both readings carry a degree of uncertainty, the question marks in the record suggesting the lettering is worn or partially obscured. The stone sits to the north-east of the vestry tower within the graveyard, and its classification as a reused slab indicates it was not placed here in its original context; at some point between 1643 and whenever it was repositioned, the stone had a different life, perhaps as a building material, a threshold, or a surface repurposed for other needs, before ending up here, inverted, back among the dead.