Graveslab, St. Francisabbey, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
A graveslab that began its existence in one religious house now rests inside another, having made the short but symbolically considerable journey from the Franciscan friary in the town of Cashel up to the Vicars Choral on the Rock of Cashel.
The slab is no longer where it was made to be, which is itself a small, telling detail about how the remnants of medieval religious life in Ireland have been gathered, shifted, and sheltered over the centuries.
The slab originated in the Franciscan friary situated in the town below the Rock, a house belonging to the mendicant order that established itself widely across Ireland from the thirteenth century onwards. At some point it was removed from that setting and relocated to the Vicars Choral, the late medieval building on the Rock of Cashel that once housed the clerics responsible for singing the cathedral's daily liturgy. The Rock of Cashel is one of the most layered ecclesiastical sites in the country, and the Vicars Choral has become something of a repository for carved stonework and early Christian objects recovered from the wider complex, making it a logical, if somewhat incongruous, home for a funerary stone with origins elsewhere.