Graveslab, St. Dominicks Abbey, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
On the floor of St. Dominick's Abbey in County Tipperary, close to the north wall of the nave, lies a graveslab that has been broken into four pieces and cemented back together.
That repair work is visible enough, but the slab's real interest lies in what was carved into it before it ever cracked. The limestone is tapering, roughly 1.77 metres long and narrowing from just over half a metre at the top to 0.4 metres at the base, and its surface is covered in incised decoration of a kind that rewards a slow look rather than a passing glance.
The top of the slab is missing, but enough survives to make out a large double-ringed circle at the head, with four smaller double-ringed circles arranged within it. These concentric ring motifs appear on medieval Irish grave slabs with some frequency, often understood as schematic representations of a ringed cross. Below the circles, a circular knop, a small rounded boss or projection carved in relief, serves as the junction point from which the shaft of the cross descends. The shaft itself is formed by two parallel incised lines, and it terminates in a trefoil base, a three-lobed form, outlined again in double incised lines. The geometry is precise and deliberate, and the overall composition suggests the work of a carver familiar with the decorative vocabulary common to late medieval ecclesiastical stonework in Munster. The slab was described in print by Maher in 1997, though it had presumably been lying in place for centuries before that.