Graveslab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

On the holy island of Inis Cealtra, set in Lough Derg on the Shannon, a fourteenth-century graveslab survives in pieces, its upper portion gone entirely and its remaining sections scattered across different parts of the monastic site.

What makes it quietly unusual is not just its fragmentation but its decoration: the surface was divided lengthwise into two panels filled with floral patterning, with no cross anywhere on it. For a medieval Irish graveslab, the absence of a cross is a notable departure from convention.

The scholar R. A. S. Macalister recorded the slab in 1916 and 1917, cataloguing it as no. 86 in his survey of the site. At the time of his visit, one portion lay against the north wall of the nave of St. Caimin's church, roughly 5.78 metres from the west gable, while two other portions were lying flat on the floor of the church, actively marking more recent burials. Several additional pieces were already missing. Today the lower portion, measuring roughly 49 centimetres wide and 53 centimetres high, remains against that north nave wall. The middle portion, somewhat thicker at 40 centimetres, has been lifted and mounted on a wall near the entrance to the Saint's graveyard, where it sits alongside another graveslab fragment. The upper portion has not been located.

Visitors to Inis Cealtra, which is accessible by boat from Mountshannon on the Clare shore, will find the fragments in two separate locations on the island. The lower portion in the nave and the mounted middle section near the Saint's graveyard are easy to overlook individually, and it takes a moment to register that they were once a single slab, elaborately worked and now quietly coming apart across the centuries.

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