Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

A limestone graveslab that came to light not during an archaeological excavation but during the construction of a car park has ended up in the yard of a Franciscan friary in County Tipperary, quietly outlasting the circumstances of its rediscovery.

The slab is modest in size, just over a metre long and roughly thirty centimetres wide, yet its surface carries an unusually precise programme of decoration that repays close attention.

The upper face is carved with a four-armed cross set in relief within a recessed square, a design in which the bifid terminals, meaning the forked or split ends of each cross arm, push deliberately beyond the boundary of that square. A lozenge shape marks the centre of the cross, the shaft is defined by parallel incised lines, and the base resolves into two inverted, closed Y-forms contained within a rectangular incised area. These details, particularly the bifid terminals and the boxed termination of the shaft, point to a thirteenth-century date. What makes the slab genuinely unusual, however, is a column of three incised mason's tools running down the sinister side of the shaft, that is, the left side as you face the cross. Stacked one above the other, they depict a mallet, a chisel, and a mason's square. Such tools appearing on a graveslab suggest the person commemorated was a craftsman, possibly the kind of skilled stone-worker who would have contributed to the construction of the very friary church beside which the slab now rests. The edges of the slab are chamfered, a neat bevelled finish that gives even this functional detail a degree of care and deliberateness.

The slab is now kept in the external yard immediately to the north of the Franciscan friary church, having been moved there after its accidental uncovering to the west of the entrance. It sits within a working ecclesiastical site, so access is subject to the usual considerations of an active religious complex, but the yard is not remote or difficult to reach.

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