Graveslab, Lorrha, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Lorrha, Co. Tipperary

At the east end of a ruined Dominican friary in north Tipperary, a large stone slab lies flat on the ground, cracked clean down the middle.

It measures roughly 1.6 metres long and just under a metre wide, with carefully worked chamfered edges, the kind of bevelled finishing that signals deliberate craft rather than a utilitarian grave marker. Somebody, at some point, went to considerable trouble for this stone, and then it broke.

The friary at Lorrha dates to the 13th century, a period when the Dominican order was expanding rapidly across Ireland following its arrival in the 1220s. The slab sits within the chancel, the eastern section of the church reserved for the clergy and for those wealthy or important enough to be buried close to the altar, a position that carried real spiritual significance in medieval Catholic practice. Recumbent grave slabs of this kind were typically placed directly over a burial, and the chamfered edges suggest it was finished with some care, though no inscription or figurative carving is recorded. The break running through its centre is the most arresting thing about it now, a fracture that divides the stone into two halves without fully displacing them.

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Pete F
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