Graveslab, Killimor And Boleybeg, Co. Galway

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Killimor And Boleybeg, Co. Galway

In the north-east corner of a ruined church at Killimor and Boleybeg, a large flat graveslab lies broken into three pieces, its inscription only partly legible after nearly four centuries.

The stone is just over 1.8 metres long and tapers from around 66 centimetres at its widest to 37 centimetres at its narrower end, a shape fairly typical of the period, but the decorative carving on its surface is worth pausing over. The cross depicted on the slab has a head formed from an open lozenge shape, the arms of which expand outward into fleur-de-lis terminals, the stylised lily motif borrowed from heraldry and commonly found on ecclesiastical stonework of the seventeenth century. Below the cross head, the shaft descends to a stepped Calvary base, representing the three tiers of the hill on which the crucifixion was said to have taken place.

The slab dates to the 1640s, though the final digit of the year has been lost or obscured, leaving only "164?" to fix it in time. It was made for a man named Thomas, whose surname appears in the inscription as something close to "Tressy", with an additional element before it that has not survived intact. The stone was also intended to commemorate his son William, though William's surname and any further details have been worn or damaged beyond reading. The inscription runs along the sides and shaft of the cross rather than being confined to a bordered panel, which gives it an unusual visual quality, the letters winding around the carved forms rather than sitting apart from them. The slab was already known to nineteenth-century antiquarians and was noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the 1830s and later edited by Michael O'Flanagan in a 1927 publication, suggesting it had drawn attention even then as something worth recording.

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