Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

Among the cathedral ruins on the Rock of Cashel, a graveslab lies in the choir that rewards closer attention than it typically receives.

The slab is a tapering limestone form, just under two metres long, cracked across its centre and twice more near its base. Its carved decoration is the unusual part: a seven-armed segmental fleur-de-lis cross worked in relief, with broad cross-bands at the base of the cross-head and again at the foot of the shaft, which terminates in a pillar-base form. The design is precise and considered, the kind of work that implies both a skilled carver and a family with the means to commission one.

Along the right-hand lower edge, a Latin inscription runs in Black Letter script, the angular lettering style common on medieval funerary monuments across Ireland and Britain. The stone's weathering has made most of it illegible, but early-twentieth-century scholarship offers a partial recovery. Writing between 1901 and 1903, FitzGerald managed to read enough to record the fragment ...FILIUS PETRI HEDIAN..., which translates as "Son of Peter Hayden". The Hayden name, Latinised here as Hedian, connects the slab to a family whose presence in medieval Tipperary left at least this one quiet trace. Who exactly this son of Peter Hayden was, what office or standing he held, and when he died remain open questions; the stone does not say, or no longer does.

The slab sits in the choir of the cathedral, which is itself roofless, open to the sky since the eighteenth century. Visitors moving through the complex can find it there, though the crack and weathering mean its details are best studied at close range and in good light. The fleur-de-lis cross and the abbreviated inscription together make it worth pausing over, even on a site as densely layered as the Rock of Cashel.

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