Graveslab, Callan, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Tombs & Memorials
Inside the west tower of St Mary's medieval parish church in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, there once lay a broken piece of stone that recorded, in fragmentary Latin, the burial of a man named John Gorman.
It is no longer there. Nobody is quite sure where it went.
The fragment was documented by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, who found it lying at the base of the tower and noted enough of its inscription to work out a partial translation: "Here lies John Gorman, formerly burgess...." The word burgess indicates that Gorman held the status of a full citizen of the medieval town, a rank that typically came with property rights and a voice in local governance. The script was almost certainly Black Letter, the dense angular lettering used widely in medieval ecclesiastical and funerary inscriptions across Ireland and Britain; Carrigan did not say so explicitly, but he rendered the text in Gothic font, which strongly implies it. The inscription itself was already incomplete when Carrigan saw it, the slab having been broken at some earlier point, leaving gaps in Gorman's name and the rest of his epitaph. What survived read: "Hic.....es Gorman quondi burge...." The date of the original carving is unknown, and no further details about Gorman or his family have been recorded alongside it.
The slab is now listed as unlocated. Whether it was moved during works to the church, broken up further, or simply misplaced over the intervening century, is not recorded. What remains is Carrigan's transcription, a few words of Latin preserved in a 1905 volume, standing in for a stone that has quietly disappeared.