Graveslab, Kildare, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Kildare, Co. Kildare

St. Brigid's Cathedral in Kildare town contains one of the more quietly absorbing accumulations of medieval and early modern stonework in Ireland, a collection of cross slabs, grave slabs, decorated stones, and three effigies spanning roughly seven centuries, from the 10th to the 17th. Among them, one small piece sits outside the east gable wall of the chancel rather than within the cathedral itself, slightly apart from the main gathering, and it is all the more affecting for its modest scale.

The stone in question is a rectangular limestone slab, just 39 centimetres high and 48 centimetres wide, broken into two fragments. Despite its small size, it carries a legible inscription in Roman lettering, recording the death of one Henry Lyndall on the 21st of April 1688. The spelling is characteristic of its period, with the archaic "ye" used in place of "the" and the mixture of upper and lower case that appears frequently in late 17th-century memorial inscriptions. Nothing in the surviving record explains who Henry Lyndall was, what brought him to Kildare, or why his memorial ended up positioned outside rather than inside the building. The slab was noted by Fitzgerald in the early 1900s and later catalogued by Bradley and colleagues in 1986, by which point it had already been recognised as part of the broader collection associated with the cathedral.

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