Graveslab, Lisronagh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Lisronagh, Co. Tipperary

Against the east gable of the Church of Ireland church at Lisronagh, Co. Tipperary, sits a fragment of carved stone that most visitors to the site would walk past without a second glance.

It is, in fact, two fragments, the upper and lower portions of a late medieval graveslab, the middle section long since lost. What survives is unusual enough to reward a closer look: a seven-armed cross carved in relief, its terminals shaped into simple floral forms, with decorative motifs filling the sunken segments of the cross-head. The top left corner of the slab has broken away, but three of the remaining motifs are described as typically Celtic in character, placing the piece within a decorative tradition that was already ancient when the slab was made.

The church at Lisronagh stands on the site of an earlier medieval structure, and the graveslab belongs to that longer story of use and reuse. Researcher Maher, writing in 1992, examined the piece in considerable detail and proposed a date somewhere in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, a period when this kind of intricately carved funerary stonework was produced across Munster and beyond. The seven-armed cross is a form that departs from the more common four- or six-armed designs, giving the composition an asymmetrical complexity that feels deliberate rather than accidental. The floriated terminals, where the arms of the cross end in stylised leaf or petal shapes, are a detail typical of high-quality workshop production from this era, suggesting whoever commissioned the slab had both the means and the expectation of something finely made.

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