Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Set into the floor at the eastern end of the north aisle of Holy Trinity Church of Ireland in Fethard, a limestone graveslab holds its secrets rather well.

The inscription running along its border has worn beyond reading, and the shield carved beside the cross shaft offers no name to go with it. What remains is the stonework itself, nearly two metres of finely worked medieval relief carving, still underfoot in a building that has been in continuous religious use since the Middle Ages.

The slab measures 1.86 metres long and 0.77 metres wide, and its central feature is a seven-armed cross, an unusual form in which additional arms branch from the shaft, each terminal ending in a fleur-de-lis, the stylised lily motif borrowed from heraldic tradition. The cross-shaft rises from a triangular base and is punctuated by two knops, one three-barred knop near the top and another at the base of the shaft, where it meets the cross-base. A knop, in this context, is a small decorative boss or protrusion used to articulate the shaft, common in medieval ecclesiastical stonework. The shield to the dexter side, meaning the right-hand side as the figure on the slab would have seen it, once identified the person interred beneath, but whatever arms it bore have not survived legibly. The church itself was originally the medieval parish church of St John the Baptist, and the slab belongs to that earlier layer of the building's history, when Fethard was a walled Anglo-Norman town of some regional significance.

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