Graveslab, Portumna Demesne, Co. Galway

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Portumna Demesne, Co. Galway

Lying flat on the floor of the south transept of Portumna Friary, a large limestone graveslab carries an inscription that stops short of completing its own story.

The stone records a man named Dermot Meagher, from a place rendered in the carving as "Cloncr??" — the final letters worn or damaged beyond recovery, leaving his townland of origin permanently uncertain. That small lacuna, preserved in stone for over three centuries, gives the slab an odd intimacy: a life recorded with care, but incompletely surviving it.

The slab itself is substantial, measuring just over two metres in length and nearly eight centimetres thick, though it has fractured at some point across its face. The decoration follows a style typical of seventeenth-century Irish funerary carving. A stepped Latin cross occupies the upper portion, rendered in false relief, meaning the design is raised slightly from the surrounding surface rather than deeply cut. At the centre of the cross-head sits a lozenge shape terminating in fleur-de-lis motifs at each arm, and within the lozenge an IHS monogram, a Christogram derived from the Greek spelling of Jesus and widely used in Catholic devotional art of the period. A small cross rises from the crossbar of the H, a common elaboration of the symbol. Below this, the undecorated shaft gives way to the inscription, which records that Dermot Meagher died on the 27th of April 1681. The friary itself, a Dominican house founded in the early fifteenth century, had passed through turbulent decades by that point, suppressed during the Reformation and damaged during the Cromwellian wars, yet burials continued here into the later seventeenth century, suggesting the site retained local significance long after its formal religious life had been disrupted.

The slab remains in situ within the roofless friary church, which sits within the grounds of Portumna Demesne in south County Galway. The transept floor where it lies is open to the elements, so the stone continues to weather, making the already-damaged inscription progressively harder to read in full.

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