Graveslab, Roscam, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Tombs & Memorials
A graveslab lying broken in two on what appears to be a stone-lined grave plot is not, in itself, a rare thing in Ireland.
What makes this one at Roscam quietly arresting is the quality and character of its carved decoration. Nearly two metres long and gently tapering from head to foot, the slab carries a two-line Latin cross rendered in false relief, meaning the cross is not incised into the surface but rather the surrounding stone is cut away slightly so that the cross appears to rise from it. The head and arms of the cross terminate in fleur-de-lis motifs, the three-pointed lily form associated throughout medieval Europe with purity and royal or ecclesiastical dignity. Four further fleur-de-lis shapes appear to extend inward from the top and sides of the slab toward the centre of the cross, and the shaft runs the full length of the stone. The slab is broken in two just below its midpoint, with some additional fracturing near the top of the lower portion, but enough survives to read the design clearly.
Roscam sits on a peninsula on the eastern shore of Galway Bay, and the site as a whole belongs to a much older layer of Irish religious life. The graveslab lies within a graveyard that is itself enclosed within an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly oval or curvilinear boundary that marks out many of Ireland's earliest monastic foundations, often predating the Norman arrival and in some cases reaching back to the early Christian centuries. The slab's tapered form and its fleur-de-lis ornament are consistent with medieval funerary stonework produced somewhere between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, a period when such decorative vocabulary was widely shared across western European ecclesiastical culture. The bevelled sides of the slab, which also decrease in thickness from top to bottom, reflect a level of careful stoneworking that sets it apart from more roughly finished grave markers of the same era.