Graveslab, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny

On the floor of a Church of Ireland building in Gowran, Co. Kilkenny, a limestone graveslab lies broken into three pieces, its edges worn and portions of its surface entirely gone.

It is easy to walk past without registering what it once was, but look closely and the faint outline of a carved cross emerges from the stone, raised just enough above the surface to catch the light at a certain angle.

The slab is straight-sided and decorated with a cross in low relief, a type of funerary carving common to medieval Ireland in which the cross was the dominant motif, sometimes accompanied by inscriptions or figural imagery, though here the design is relatively restrained. The cross-head has four arms with fleur-de-lis terminals, the stylised lily-shaped flourish found widely in medieval decorative work, and beneath it sits an oval knop, a rounded boss or protrusion that often marked the junction between cross-head and shaft. The shaft itself appears to end without a base, which may reflect the original design or simply the loss of the lower section of the stone. The church that now houses it was built in the nineteenth century, but it was constructed on the site of the former chancel of St Mary's, a thirteenth-century church of considerable local significance. That layering of periods, a nineteenth-century Protestant church occupying the liturgical heart of a medieval Catholic one, gives the fragment an added charge. Whatever grave this slab once marked, the stone has outlasted the building raised above it, the denomination that worshipped there, and most of the context that might have explained who lay beneath.

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