Graveslab (present location), Knockpatrick, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Tombs & Memorials
Set into the graveyard wall at Knockpatrick in County Kildare, a granite graveslab sits in a location that is almost certainly not its own. The slab is reportedly a traveller, reputedly recovered from near the Nunnery at Graney some distance away, and now fixed in place with concrete that obscures its base and right-hand edge, as though the material itself has been reluctantly absorbed into its adopted home.
The slab is slightly tapering, measuring roughly 75 centimetres in height and between 31 and 37 centimetres wide, carved in low relief with a ringed cross, the kind of encircled cross-form that appears widely across early medieval Irish stonework. The cross has splayed terminals and a stem, and at the junction where the two meet sits a small bulbous feature, around 11 centimetres across, which may be a decorative boss or knop. What makes the carving more unusual are two diagonal appendages extending from this central feature. Peter Harbison, writing between 1989 and 1991, interpreted these as ribbons, though the identification remains tentative. The combination of the boss and ribbon-like extensions gives the design a quality that sits slightly outside the standard repertoire of early Christian grave markers, suggesting either an idiosyncratic local carver or a piece with some particular commemorative intent that is now impossible to recover. Its presumed original context, the Nunnery at Graney, was a religious site of some significance in the medieval period, and the slab may once have marked a grave within or close to that community before its removal to Knockpatrick.