Graveslab, Strade, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Tombs & Memorials
Among the five medieval grave-slabs propped against the south wall of the chancel at Strade Dominican friary in County Mayo, one survives only as a lower fragment, its upper portion long since lost.
What remains is the tapered base of a wedge-shaped slab, edged with a raised border and bearing the low-relief shaft of a cross rising from its centre. The shaft ends in a trefoil terminal, the three-lobed form that signals what once crowned the whole: most likely a bottonée or foliated cross, in which the arms terminate in rounded, bud-like projections resembling trefoils or leaves. Two of the intact slabs displayed alongside this fragment still carry complete versions of that same cross type, allowing a reasonable reconstruction of what the broken slab originally looked like.
The slab is thought to date to the thirteenth century, placing it within or close to the period of the friary's foundation. Strade itself has a complicated ecclesiastical history, with the site passing between Franciscan and Dominican hands during the medieval period. The chancel where these slabs are gathered represents one of the better-preserved portions of the structure, and the collection of funerary stonework displayed there gives some sense of the patronage and commemoration practices associated with the friary across the medieval centuries. A grave-slab of this kind would originally have lain flat over a burial, its carved surface identifying and honouring the person interred beneath. The fact that five such slabs survive at Strade, even in varying states of completeness, is relatively unusual for a rural Mayo site.