Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

In St. Mary's graveyard in Burgagery-Lands, a plain rectangular slab stands embedded in the ground west of the porch, its surface carrying only a handful of incised capital letters: N L and ET SOCII VII.

There is no elaborate epitaph, no carved imagery, no decorative border. Yet those sparse Latin characters, meaning roughly "and seven companions", mark something considerable: the memory of a Jesuit priest and the eight men who died with him.

The slab commemorates Fr. Nicholas Leynagh and his seven colleagues, all martyred in 1625. The Jesuits had been operating in Ireland under conditions of sustained legal hostility since the Elizabethan era, and by the early seventeenth century, practising Catholic clergy faced the constant threat of prosecution, imprisonment, or worse under the penal laws then in force. The slab itself is modest in its dimensions, 1.19 metres above ground, 0.78 metres wide, and 0.12 metres thick, and its plainness may reflect the circumstances under which such a memorial could safely be made. The incised lettering is the whole of it; the restraint is itself a kind of record.

The graveslab sits to the west of the church porch within St. Mary's graveyard, and visitors who know what to look for will find it embedded directly in the ground rather than freestanding in the conventional sense.

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