Graveslab, Portumna Demesne, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Portumna Demesne, Co. Galway

Set into the floor of a ruined friary chancel in County Galway, a fractured medieval graveslab quietly rewards anyone who looks down rather than up.

Lying recumbent, as such slabs are meant to, it is the easternmost of three coffin-shaped stones arranged in a row directly in front of the east window, and nearly every centimetre of its surface has been worked. False relief, a technique in which the background is cut away to leave the design standing proud without the forms being fully sculpted in the round, covers the slab almost completely, giving it a density of decoration unusual even by the standards of medieval Irish funerary carving.

Bradley and Dunne, writing in 1992, placed this slab and its neighbours in the fourteenth or fifteenth century and described them as bevelled coffin-shaped stones, meaning the edges are cut at an angle rather than straight down. The decoration is arranged in three distinct registers. The lower portion carries a latticework of six rows of double-banded circles, each one filled with a Greek cross at its centre. Above that, four or five squares contain interlace patterns and wheeled circle motifs, the kind of geometric vocabulary that medieval Irish craftsmen drew from both Insular and Continental sources. The uppermost section shifts register entirely, moving from abstract geometry into figuration: an incised human face enclosed within a circle, an animal form, and a fish. Whether these images carried specific devotional meaning, marked the identity of the deceased, or simply reflected the carver's wider repertoire is not recorded. The slab measures 1.9 metres in length and just nine centimetres thick, and it is now fractured, though the decoration remains largely legible across the break.

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