Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary

A flat limestone slab lying in a Tipperary churchyard carries, even in its badly worn state, one of the more direct messages a piece of carved stone can deliver: Memento Mori, remember death.

The inscription runs along the base in Roman lettering, and above it rises a seven-armed segmental cross carved in relief, each arm finishing in a fleur-de-lis, with the shaft descending to a pillar-base form decorated with a skull and crossbones. The combination is deliberate and layered, the fleur-de-lis bringing associations of purity and nobility while the skull and crossbones below the shaft grounds the whole composition in mortality. As a piece of funerary design it refuses to let the eye rest on anything comforting for long.

The slab lies prostrate, meaning it sits flat on the ground rather than standing upright, as was common for grave markers of this type in Ireland. It measures 1.67 metres in length and tapers slightly from 0.75 metres wide at the top to 0.64 metres at the base, with chamfered edges, the angled bevelling along the perimeter that was a typical finishing detail on worked stone slabs of this kind. It is positioned to the north of St. Mary's Church in Burgagery-Lands, specifically 1.3 metres north of the chancel and 1 metre east of St. Michael's Chapel. Writing in 1997, Maher recorded the decorative programme in detail, noting the seven-armed cross and the Memento Mori inscription, though by that point the surface was already very badly worn and part of the sinister side, the left-hand edge as the viewer faces it, along with the base, had broken away.

The slab sits close enough to both the chancel of St. Mary's and the wall of St. Michael's Chapel that its original placement was clearly deliberate, likely marking a grave of some local significance. The worn surface makes it difficult now to recover finer details of the carving, but the main elements Maher recorded remain legible enough to understand the intentions of whoever commissioned it.

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