Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary

On the floor of the cathedral choir at the Rock of Cashel lies a graveslab whose occupant has been, for centuries, almost entirely anonymous.

The stone records a person who died around 1500, who came from Cashel, and whose name the inscription declines to fully reveal, eroded or damaged beyond recovery. What remains is a careful piece of medieval craft and a Latin plea, carved in Black Letter script along the sides and base of the slab, asking that God have mercy on the soul within, and closing with a prompt for the living to pray a Pater and Ave on the deceased's behalf.

The slab itself is tapering, nearly two metres long, and bears a chamfered edge around its upper face, a bevelled border cut to catch light and give the stone a finished, deliberate character. The central decoration, described by Maher in 1997, consists of a seven-armed segmental cross carved in relief, with a fleur-de-lis at the tip of each arm. At the junction of head and shaft, three horizontal cross-bands mark the transition, and the shaft itself descends to a stepped base, a layered plinth form common in late medieval Irish funerary carving. The lower right corner of the slab is now missing, and the centre has been broken, which may explain in part why the inscription, first transcribed by FitzGerald in the early twentieth century, contains so many gaps. The text as recovered reads: HIC IACET....DE CASSELL QUI OBIIT, and then fragments suggesting September, the year 1500, and the standard closing prayer. The name of the deceased is gone.

That absence is, in its own way, the most striking thing about the stone. Graveslabs of this period were commissioned precisely to preserve a name and secure prayers for a specific soul. The Rock of Cashel, a complex of ecclesiastical buildings on a limestone outcrop that served as a seat of Munster kings before becoming an archiepiscopal centre, is full of monuments to remembered people. This one preserves the formula of remembrance while losing the person it was made for, a small, weathered puzzle lying quietly underfoot in the choir.

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