Graveslab, St. Patricksrock, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
On the floor of the cathedral choir on the Rock of Cashel lies a graveslab that has, by any measure, lost the argument with time.
It bears no legible inscription, its decorated surface has weathered to near-invisibility, and it survives only in fragments, chipped and spalled across its face and along its lower left edge. What remains is a tapering stone, roughly 1.86 metres long and narrowing from about 59 centimetres at the head to 38 centimetres at the base, with only the incised lines of a cross-shaft still discernible beneath centuries of erosion.
The slab was recorded as illegible as far back as the early twentieth century, when FitzGerald, writing between 1901 and 1903, offered that single blunt assessment. By the time Maher examined it in 1997, the situation had not improved. A graveslab of this type, a flat carved stone laid over or marking a burial, would once have carried the name and perhaps the status of whoever lay beneath it, likely someone of ecclesiastical or noble standing given the setting. The Rock of Cashel, the great complex of medieval buildings rising from a limestone outcrop in County Tipperary, served for centuries as a seat of both royal and ecclesiastical power, and its cathedral choir would not have accommodated the undistinguished dead. Whoever this stone once named has been entirely reclaimed by the weathering of the surface, leaving a piece of worked stone that records its own slow dissolution as much as anything else.