Graveslab, Portlecka, Co. Clare

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Portlecka, Co. Clare

In the middle of the nave of Ruan church in County Clare, set flush with the gravel floor so that it barely interrupts the ground beneath your feet, lies a medieval graveslab that most visitors would walk across without a second thought.

It is 1.46 metres long, tapering from 0.48 metres at the head down to 0.38 metres at the base, and it sits with its head oriented to the west in the manner traditional to Christian burial. The edges are rough and broken, a lower left chunk has sheared away entirely, and the surface is so weathered that only one feature remains legible: a simple incised double-lined ringed cross, the kind of motif carved in stone across Ireland during the early and later medieval periods, where a circle intersects the arms of the cross to form a design sometimes called a Celtic cross in popular usage.

The slab's precise date is not recorded, but its form and decoration place it within a long tradition of funerary stonework associated with ecclesiastical sites throughout Munster. What makes its situation quietly arresting is the ordinariness of its setting. It has not been lifted onto a plinth or protected behind glass; it simply lies there in the gravel of a ruined nave, continuous with the ground, as it presumably has for centuries. Immediately to its north lies a second graveslab of the same tapering form, described as similar but considerably better preserved, the two lying side by side in a space that was once roofed and actively used for worship.

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Pete F
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