Graveslab, Gardens, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Gardens, Co. Kilkenny

Built into the outer wall of St Mary's parish church in Kilkenny, almost at the junction where the nave meets the south transept, is a piece of medieval stonework that was never meant to end up there.

A fragment of a graveslab, cut from fossiliferous limestone, has been reused as ordinary building material, set flush into the external face of the wall like any other block. Only the incised cross-shaft carved into its surface gives away what it once was.

The slab dates to the thirteenth or fourteenth century and is uninscribed, meaning whoever it originally marked has left no name behind. Fossiliferous limestone, which contains the visible remains of ancient marine organisms locked into the stone, was commonly worked in this region during the medieval period, and its use here places the fragment within a recognisable local tradition of funerary carving. At some point, the central portion of the slab was broken or repurposed, and rather than being discarded, it was incorporated into the church fabric. This kind of reuse was not unusual in medieval and post-medieval building practice; stone was a practical resource, and a broken graveslab was still good masonry. The result, though, is quietly odd: a memorial object stripped of its commemorative function and pressed into the wall of the very building it was presumably once associated with.

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