Graveslab, Dungarvan, Co. Kilkenny

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Dungarvan, Co. Kilkenny

Scattered across a graveyard in the Kilkenny townland of Dungarvan are a group of medieval stone slabs that carry no names, no dates, and no epitaphs.

What they do carry are incised crosses and, on some, carved human heads in relief, faces pressed into the stone above graves whose occupants have left no other trace.

The slabs sit roughly ten to fifteen metres south-west of the porch of a ruined Church of Ireland church, itself built on the site of a medieval foundation. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan counted about half a dozen of them, describing coffin-shaped stones, all uninscribed, all bearing incised crosses, with several showing those carved heads. Coffin-shaped grave slabs of this kind were common across medieval Ireland and Britain, typically cut to taper from the shoulder end toward the foot, and were used from roughly the twelfth century onward. The incised cross was the most standard form of decoration, a mark of Christian burial that needed no further explanation. The relief heads are the more unusual detail, a motif that occasionally appears on medieval Irish grave monuments but is far from routine, and whose precise significance, devotional, commemorative, or apotropaic, remains a matter of interpretation.

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