Graveslab, Lickmolassy, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Lickmolassy, Co. Galway

Propped against the eastern end of the south wall inside the nave of a ruined church in Lickmolassy, a fragment of a seventeenth-century graveslab sits at an angle that makes it easy to walk past without a second glance.

Only the upper portion survives, measuring just over a metre and a half in length and nearly eighty centimetres wide, its thickness varying across its face. What gives it away, once you look closely, is the carving: the letters IHS enclosed within a lozenge shape that broadens as it extends into the arms and shaft of a cross, accompanied by Calvary-based symbols and a fleur-de-lis. An inscription traces the edges of the slab, though the full text is incomplete. The back has been roughly flaked flat, which tells us the slab was made to lie horizontally over a grave rather than stand upright.

The IHS monogram, a Latin abbreviation derived from the Greek spelling of the name of Jesus, appears frequently on Irish memorial stonework from the late medieval and early modern periods, often surrounded by exactly this kind of decorative Christian imagery. The Calvary cross, evoking the site of the Crucifixion, and the fleur-de-lis, a stylised lily with deep Marian associations, were common companions to the IHS device in Counter-Reformation funerary carving. The slab was brought to wider attention by Dr Christy Cunniffe, and it is not alone: two other graveslabs of comparable character lie elsewhere within the same church, suggesting that the site once served a community with both the resources and the inclination to commission carved memorial stonework of this type during the 1600s.

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