Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

In the organ room of Holy Trinity Church of Ireland in Fethard, Co. Tipperary, a fragment of medieval limestone lies in the north-east corner of what was once the nave of a much older building.

It is not displayed prominently or labelled in any dramatic way; it simply occupies its corner, as it has done for some considerable time, carrying an inscription that nobody can now read.

The slab is only a lower portion of what was once a larger tapering graveslab, roughly 79 centimetres long and between 41 and 47 centimetres wide, cut from limestone and finished with an undercut chamfer along its edges. One edge is chipped. Carved into its surface is an incised cross-shaft with a stepped base, and at the centre of that shaft a quartered lozenge, a diamond shape divided into four sections, which may have been added at the same time as the rest of the decoration. Along the base and left side of the slab runs an inscription in Lombardic lettering, a rounded, decorative script commonly used on medieval memorial stones across Ireland and Britain, but whatever name or prayer or formula it once spelled out is now illegible. The church it belongs to was originally the medieval parish church of St John the Baptist, and the slab lies close to another medieval graveslab nearby, associated with the Hackett and Roket families. Maher, writing in 1997, recorded the lozenge detail and noted the illegibility of the inscription, which suggests the letters were already beyond recovery by then, if not long before.

The building itself, now Holy Trinity Church of Ireland, still contains the physical footprint of its medieval predecessor, and the organ room in the former nave is where this fragment quietly persists. Visitors with an interest in medieval funerary carving will find it worth seeking out, though the illegible inscription is a reminder that some things about the past simply cannot be recovered.

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