Graveslab, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny

On the floor of a Church of Ireland building in Gowran, Co. Kilkenny, an old graveslab lies in the north-west angle of the nave, cracked across its middle and missing a triangular wedge of stone, yet still legible enough to reward a close look.

It is a long, narrow piece of work, measuring just over two metres in total length and less than half a metre wide, the kind of slab that would once have marked a burial of some consequence. The fractures that run horizontally and vertically through the cross-head, and the fissure cracking around the shaft, speak to centuries of handling, displacement, and neglect, though the carved decoration beneath all that damage remains remarkably coherent.

The church itself is a nineteenth-century construction, but it was built directly on the former chancel of the medieval church of St Mary's, a thirteenth-century foundation. The graveslab almost certainly originates from that earlier context. Its incised decoration follows a grammar that was well established in high medieval funerary carving: a three-armed cross-head with fleur-de-lis terminals, the stylised lily form used widely in Gothic ornament and heraldry, combined with a series of circular knops, which are rounded bosses or bulges that punctuate the shaft at intervals. From each knop, further fleur-de-lis spring outward from the stem, and the shaft closes at its base with a final, larger fleur-de-lis below two barred knops. The overall effect is of a cross that has been made to grow, almost botanically, downward along the stone. Stylistically, the piece is placed in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, which would align it with the medieval life of St Mary's rather than anything later.

The slab sits quietly on the floor where it has been placed rather than displayed, easy to walk past without registering what it is. The floriated shaft is worth examining at ground level if the light is reasonable, since incised work of this kind can be nearly invisible in flat or dim conditions but reads clearly when light catches the stone at an angle.

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