Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

In the graveyard of Fethard's Augustinian abbey, a medieval graveslab lies propped on its side against the interior east wall of the north transept, as though it has been quietly waiting there for centuries while the world rearranged itself around it.

Part of it has broken away entirely, and a lower corner is gone, but enough survives to show just how elaborate it once was. The slab, roughly 1.9 metres long and 0.68 metres wide, carries a seven-armed segmental-headed cross carved in relief, its terminals finished in fleur-de-lis. The cross head is divided into four sections, each filled with a different motif: a vine-leaf, a marigold, a trefoil, and a cross moline (a heraldic cross whose arms end in two outward curves). Three-barred knops, small decorative knobs, mark the base of the cross-head and the base of the shaft, which itself rests on a carved pillar-base form. It is the kind of stonework that speaks to both craft and money.

The inscription carved around the slab's edges adds a personal dimension to all that formal ornament. In Roman lettering, the surviving text reads in part as PROSE. SUAQUE / PROGENIE followed by a date beginning 24 and then fragments. When the slab was apparently more complete in the early twentieth century, the historian Knowles, writing in 1903, was able to render a fuller translation: the stone was erected by a man named Redmund Vinn to the memory of himself and his children, on 24 December of a year that is now lost. A later study by Maher in 1997 found the inscription already more worn and partial. The name Redmund Vinn is not a common one in the Irish medieval record, and the slab's quality suggests he was a person of some local standing, though nothing more about him is recoverable from the stone itself.

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