Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
On the Rock of Cashel, among the more celebrated carvings and high crosses that draw most of the attention, a fragment of a graveslab lies quietly in the choir of the cathedral.
It is easy to overlook, partly because of its condition and partly because it offers nothing so legible as a name or a date. What it does offer is a seven-armed cross carved in relief, its terminals finished in stylised fleur-de-lis forms, with a second, incised outline cross worked into the centre of the cross-head. The slab survives only as an upper portion, measuring roughly 59 centimetres in length and 75 centimetres in width, with one corner slightly broken away.
The decoration is the only record this stone now holds of whoever it once commemorated. There is no inscription, and by the time Walter FitzGerald examined it in the early twentieth century, writing it up between 1901 and 1903, he could only note it as illegible. Maher, writing nearly a century later in 1997, recorded the same absence, describing the slab's worn surface and cataloguing the cross design with its unusual seven arms, a form that appears occasionally in medieval Irish funerary carving. The fleur-de-lis terminals place it within a broader European decorative tradition that filtered into Irish ecclesiastical stonework during the medieval period, though exactly when this particular slab was made, and for whom, remains unknown.