Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

A graveslab that tells two stories at once is unusual enough.

This one, standing upright against the outer wall of the north aisle of the chancel in St. Mary's graveyard in Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary, goes a step further: it was commissioned not by the deceased, but by his widow, who then outlived her own monument by five years. The limestone slab, over two metres tall and more than a metre wide, carries a fleur-de-lys seven-arm cross at its centre, flanked by two coats of arms carved in relief. Around the border, in black-letter script, a Latin inscription runs in a tradition common to late medieval and early modern Irish memorial carving, the kind of lettering more familiar from illuminated manuscripts than from churchyard stonework.

The inscription, now barely legible, records that Geoffry Barron died on 22 March 1601. Four years later, in 1605, his wife Bellina, also known as Beale, a member of the White family, had the tomb made. She died in 1610, and the slab commemorates them both. The heraldry reinforces the double identity of the monument: on one side of the cross shaft, the Barron arms show a shield with two lions passant, a pose in which a lion walks with one paw raised; on the other, the White arms display a simpler shield bearing a chevron, a V-shaped band that was a common element in medieval armorial design. The Latin closing formula, "quorum animabus propitietur Deus," meaning "on whose souls may God have mercy," was a standard funerary appeal of the period, but the fact that Bellina inserted herself into the inscription before her own death gives the slab an unusual self-awareness. She was not remembered by others; she arranged the remembering herself.

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