Graveslab, Gardens, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Tombs & Memorials
Worked into the external west wall of St Mary's parish church in the Gardens area of Kilkenny, there is a fragment of medieval graveslab that most people walking past would never notice.
It sits north of the 1820 west tower, not displayed or labelled but simply built into the fabric of the wall, a piece of funerary stonework from the thirteenth or fourteenth century that has been repurposed as ordinary building material.
The slab is made from fossiliferous limestone, a stone dense with the compressed remains of ancient marine organisms, which was commonly worked by medieval masons in the Kilkenny area. It carries an incised cross-shaft ending in a simple trefoil base, that three-lobed form familiar from medieval ecclesiastical decoration, though here rendered plainly, without inscription or any identifying mark to tell us whose grave it once covered. The absence of any inscription is not unusual for the period; many medieval grave markers relied entirely on carved ornament rather than text. What is unusual is that this fragment survived at all, having been lifted from its original context and pressed into reuse in a church wall, probably during some phase of construction or repair, where it has remained ever since.
