Graveslab, Portlecka, Co. Clare

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Portlecka, Co. Clare

On the gravelled floor of Ruan Church in County Clare lies a fragment of stone that is easy to overlook, partly because it is lying flat and partly because it is broken.

What survives is roughly three-quarters of a metre of a tapering graveslab, its upper half long since lost, resting where it has presumably rested for a considerable time. A graveslab of this kind is essentially a carved memorial stone laid horizontally over a burial, and this one carries a double-lined incised cross-shaft ending in a stepped base, the lines cut cleanly into the surface rather than raised in relief. There is no inscription, or at least none that has survived.

The fragment measures 0.75 metres in length, tapering from 0.4 metres wide at the existing top edge down to 0.35 metres at the base, and is only about six centimetres thick. The stepped base of the cross-shaft is a detail worth pausing over. This kind of termination, where the shaft broadens into a series of receding steps, appears on medieval Irish graveslabs and carved crosses and is generally associated with Romanesque and early Gothic funerary carving, though without the missing upper half it is difficult to date the piece with confidence. Whatever decoration or inscription once identified the person commemorated here is gone with that lost section.

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Pete F
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