Graveslab, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Tombs & Memorials
Among the oldest parish churches on Dublin's northside, St Michan's is best known for its vaults, where the peculiar chemistry of the limestone beneath the building has kept certain medieval mummies in a state of partial preservation for centuries.
Less remarked upon, though quietly present in the churchyard above ground, is a graveslab commemorating Alexander Johnson, who died in 1692. A graveslab is exactly what it sounds like, a flat stone laid horizontally over or near a burial, often carved with the name, dates, and sometimes the occupation or family arms of the deceased. What makes Johnson's slab worth pausing over is simply its age and its survival: it belongs to a period of Dublin history, the years just after the Williamite wars, when the city was in considerable political and social flux, and when many such stones from that era have long since been lost to weather, disturbance, or the expansion of the city around them.
The record of this slab appears in the sixth volume of the Memorials of the Dead series, published between 1904 and 1906, a meticulous cataloguing project that documented funerary inscriptions across Ireland before many were damaged or disappeared entirely. That Johnson died in 1692 places him just three years after the Siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, events that reshaped land ownership, civic life, and religious practice across Ireland, including in Dublin's parishes. St Michan's itself predates Johnson considerably, its origins reaching back to a Viking foundation, though the current building is largely seventeenth century. The churchyard in which the slab sits has accumulated burials over several centuries, and Johnson's slab is one of the earlier dateable examples that survives there.
St Michan's Church is on Church Street in Dublin 7, a short walk from the Four Courts and easily reached on foot from the city centre. The church and vaults are open to visitors on a seasonal basis and charge a small admission fee for the underground tour. The churchyard itself can generally be viewed from the exterior, and the graveslab is recorded under the archaeological inventory reference DU018-020084. Those with an interest in post-medieval epigraphy or early Dublin demography may find it worth seeking out, though the carved surface of a three-hundred-year-old slab in an urban churchyard will require some patience to read clearly, particularly in flat light.