Graveslab, Fethard, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
At the south-east corner of the chancel of Holy Trinity church in Fethard, something is embedded in the stonework that most visitors would walk straight past: a medieval graveslab, repurposed as a quoinstone, which is one of the dressed corner stones used to reinforce the angle of a wall.
It is not displayed or interpreted; it is simply built in, functioning as structural material, its original purpose long subordinated to architectural necessity.
The slab is limestone, tapering in the manner typical of medieval grave markers, measuring roughly 0.8 metres in length and narrowing from 0.36 metres at the top to 0.26 metres at the base. Only the lower half survives, but it retains a crudely incised cross shaft and a stepped Calvary mount, the tiered base on which a cross was conventionally shown to stand, a motif that places it somewhere within the broad span of the 13th to 15th centuries. The carving is not refined work; it has the quality of something made locally, by hand, without great pretension, which in its own way makes it more immediate than a polished ecclesiastical commission would be. At some point after the slab was carved, it was taken from wherever it originally lay and incorporated into the fabric of the chancel buttress, the reason unrecorded and now irrecoverable.
The slab sits in plain sight on the buttress at the south-east corner of the chancel, within the graveyard itself. The graveyard surrounds the church, and the medieval stonework of Holy Trinity rewards close attention at ground level, where the fabric of the building and the accumulation of centuries tend to show themselves most clearly.