Graveslab, Rathduff, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Tombs & Memorials
Lying in the north ambulatory of the cloister at Kells Priory, this stone slab carries a quiet paradox: carved with considerable care in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, it was later lifted and put to work a second time, pressed into service as a cover for a disturbed stone-lined grave during the post-medieval period.
The original occupant it honoured, and the reasons it was moved, remain unknown. It is one of a large group of graveslabs recovered from the priory site, each representing a small piece of the community that once gathered there.
The slab itself measures just under two metres in length and tapers from 0.58 metres at the top down to 0.415 metres at the base, with a thickness of 0.16 metres. A thin raised border runs around its edge, and the surface is decorated in low false-relief, a technique in which the background is cut away slightly to leave the design standing proud without full three-dimensional carving. The central motif is a floriated cross, meaning one whose arms terminate in stylised floral forms; in this case, each arm ends in a fleur-de-lis. Where the arms meet, a double circle marks the junction, with the inner circle incised rather than raised. Below the cross-head, a circular knop sits on the shaft, and beneath that, leaf forms spring outward from either side before the shaft terminates, again, in a fleur-de-lis. The design is controlled and deliberate, consistent with the decorative vocabulary used on funerary monuments across the Anglo-Norman sphere of influence in thirteenth and fourteenth-century Ireland. Kells Priory itself was an Augustinian house, and Augustinian canons, who followed a rule of communal religious life rather than strict monastic enclosure, maintained burial grounds that served both their own community and local patrons.
The slab is one of a substantial collection from the site described and catalogued by J. Higgins in a 2007 publication arising from archaeological excavations carried out at the priory by T. Fanning and M. Clyne. Kells Priory, with its extensive and largely intact precinct walls, is accessible to visitors, and the cloister area where this slab was found remains one of the more evocative parts of the complex to walk through.