Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary

In the graveyard of the Holy Trinity Church of Ireland in Fethard, a medieval graveslab has been pressed into service as a headstone, but it was put in the ground upside down.

What faces the visitor is not the decorated surface as originally intended, but the underside of a tapering limestone slab, with only the lower portion of an incised cross-shaft and its trefoil base remaining visible above ground level. The trefoil, a three-lobed motif carved with a double incised line, is the only ornamental detail that can still be seen, the rest of the design buried beneath the soil.

The slab itself is modest in scale, measuring roughly 0.47 metres in visible length and 0.43 metres across at its midpoint, with a thickness of around 0.15 metres. It has suffered some spalling, a form of surface fracturing, along one of its lower edges. Stylistically, the cross-shaft and trefoil design places it somewhere in the 13th or 14th century, a period when such incised limestone slabs were a common funerary form across medieval Ireland. The church it sits beside has its own considerable age: it occupies the site of the medieval parish church of St John the Baptist, which has since become the Holy Trinity Church of Ireland building. The graveslab predates any later use of the site and was evidently repurposed at some point, its original commemorative identity now lost. Whoever it was made for, the name and any inscription are underground, facing downward in the dark.

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