Graveslab, Portumna Demesne, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Portumna Demesne, Co. Galway

Set into the floor of the chancel of Portumna Friary, directly in front of the east window, a limestone graveslab lies broken in two pieces, walked over and looked past for centuries.

It is the middle of three such slabs arranged in a row, all of them recumbent, which means lying flat as floor rather than standing upright as memorial. That position, combined with the quality of the carving still legible on its surface, makes it easy to underestimate what is actually underfoot.

Bradley and Dunne, writing in 1992, described these slabs as bevelled coffin-shaped stones of fourteenth or fifteenth-century date, a period when Portumna Friary was an active Dominican house on the northern shore of Lough Derg. This particular slab measures just under two metres in length and nearly nine centimetres in thickness, substantial enough to have survived in reasonable condition despite the break. A Latin cross occupies the main field, its shaft carved in low relief and decorated with a repeated floral motif, with a knotwork circle where the shaft meets the arms. Each arm terminates in a square panel: the southern one contains a Greek cross formed by dividing the square into four segments, each filled with a fleur-de-lis, while the northern panel holds a single large rosette. A border roughly eleven centimetres wide runs along both sides and the base, itself decorated, giving the whole composition a carefully bounded, formal quality. Below the northern arm, a partial inscription reads HERN(?)LI, the middle letter uncertain, the full name now irrecoverable. It is the kind of fragmentary survival that hints at an individual identity without quite delivering one, a name worn almost to nothing by time and foot traffic.

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