Graveslab, Holycross, Co. Tipperary

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Holycross, Co. Tipperary

Along the southern wall of the cloister at Holycross Abbey, there was once a medieval graveslab that has since disappeared.

Its current location is unknown, which gives it an odd double obscurity: a stone that was already largely illegible, its surface too worn to show any inscription or decoration, has now vanished from the place where it was last recorded.

The slab is catalogued as number two in D. Maher's survey of medieval grave slabs from County Tipperary, covering the period 1200 to 1600 AD, and it was one of six such slabs grouped along the southern side of the cloister of the Cistercian abbey at Holycross. What survives in the record is the upper portion only, a tapered stone measuring 1.09 metres in length, 0.53 metres wide at the top and narrowing to 0.47 metres at the base, with a thickness of 0.15 metres. The lower portion is missing entirely. Tapered graveslabs of this kind were a standard form across medieval Ireland and Britain, typically laid flat over a burial and sometimes carved with crosses, effigies, or heraldic devices. This one, if it ever bore such decoration, has been reduced by time and wear to a plain, mute surface. The Cistercian abbey at Holycross was a significant foundation in medieval Tipperary, and its cloister would have been a prestigious location for burial, the choice of families and individuals of some standing in the region.

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