Graveslab, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

Somewhere on a seventeenth-century graveslab in the churchyard of St. Catherine's on Thomas Street, Dublin, there are three letters that have puzzled observers for well over a century.

The stone commemorates Robert Bagot, a merchant from Drogheda who died on the 14th of February 1613, and his wife Ellenor Bathe, who died on the 5th of November 1616. Carved into the lower half of the slab, inside what is described as a sort of true lover's knot, are the letters W, E, and B. Why W, and not R for Robert, nobody recording the stone in 1898 could say. That small, unresolved puzzle sits quietly at the centre of an otherwise straightforward memorial.

The churchyard belongs to St. Catherine's Church, the Georgian building erected in 1769, though it occupies a site with considerably older roots: a medieval parish church stood here from at least the early thirteenth century. Bagot's inscription identifies him not only as a merchant but as a "surviving feoffee" of St. Katherine's Church, meaning he was one of the individuals legally entrusted with holding property on behalf of the parish, a common arrangement in the period for managing church lands and revenues. The slab was recorded and drawn by a Miss C. L. Long, whose illustration appeared in the Journal of the Association for the Preservation of the Memorials of the Dead in Ireland in the volume covering 1898 to 1900. That journal, now itself a historical document, was part of a broader late-Victorian effort to catalogue and preserve Irish funerary inscriptions before they were lost to weathering or neglect. Long's accompanying note on the mysterious W suggests she puzzled over it herself, and left the question open.

St. Catherine's Church on Thomas Street is well known in Dublin for other reasons, the facade being a familiar feature of that part of the Liberties, but the graveyard to the south of the building is quieter territory. The slab's current condition is not recorded in the available sources, and visitors should be prepared for the possibility that time and the elements have done their work on a stone already described at some remove in the 1890s. The inscription, rendered in the broad capitalised lettering typical of early seventeenth-century memorial carving, with its archaic spellings and phonetic approximations, is worth reading closely if the stone remains legible. The carved IHS monogram near the head of the stone is a Christogram, a common devotional symbol of the period. The true lover's knot framing those three unexplained letters is, in the end, the detail that lingers.

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