Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

At the western end of St. Mary's graveyard in Burgagery-Lands, a small upright slab carries an inscription that stops mid-sentence.

The stone reads, in raised Roman lettering within a plain border: HERE LIETH INTERRED THE BODY OF CHARLES BLOVNT SON TO COLL CHARLES BLOVNT WHO, and then says nothing more, at least not above the surface. The sentence it began has continued underground, swallowed by centuries of accumulated earth around its base.

The slab itself is modest in scale, just 0.41 metres visible above ground, 0.43 metres wide, and 0.17 metres thick, with a roughly dressed back suggesting it was always intended to stand in a fixed position rather than lie flat. What the buried portion once said was recorded by a nineteenth-century transcription, published by Vigors between 1888 and 1891, which completed the epitaph: the stone commemorates Charles Blovnt, son of Colonel Charles Blovnt, who departed this life on 4 January 1651. The date places his death in the middle of one of the most turbulent decades in Irish history, a period of Cromwellian campaigns and widespread displacement across Munster. The Blovnt family name, an anglicised variant of Blount, was associated with English and Anglo-Norman settler families, and a colonel of that name in mid-seventeenth-century Tipperary would have occupied a world defined by garrison politics and the upheaval of plantation.

The slab stands close to the west porch, upright and embedded, which means the ground level around it has risen considerably since 1651, gradually obscuring the very words carved to preserve a name. The full inscription survives only because someone thought to copy it before the earth closed over it entirely.

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