Graveslab, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Tombs & Memorials
On the floor of a Church of Ireland building in Gowran, Co. Kilkenny, a medieval graveslab lies in the northwest corner, easy to overlook and missing its head entirely.
What survives is a tapering limestone slab just under two metres long, its surface carved with an incised cross whose shaft ends in a large fleur-de-lis, the stylised three-petalled lily form that appears frequently in medieval ecclesiastical decoration across Ireland and Europe. A second fleur-de-lis near the top of the shaft is thought to represent the lower arm of the now-absent cross-head. The upper edges of the slab's sides and base are finished with a slightly hollow chamfer, a narrow bevelled border that gives the piece a quiet precision, and there is some damage to the upper right side in the form of small circular depressions and scattered incised lines, whether accidental or deliberate is unclear.
The church that now houses the slab was built in the nineteenth century on the former chancel of St Mary's, a thirteenth-century foundation that was itself one of the more significant medieval collegiate churches in Kilkenny. The graveslab is thought on stylistic grounds to date from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, placing it squarely within the period when St Mary's was an active and presumably well-patronised place of worship. The slab is cracked across its lower section, and the missing head suggests it has had a complicated afterlife, shifted, built over, or partially broken at some point before it came to rest in its present corner. Incised slabs of this kind, where decoration is cut directly into the stone surface rather than carved in relief, were a common funerary form in medieval Ireland, typically marking the graves of clergy or minor nobility.