Graveslab, Tinvoher, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Tinvoher, Co. Tipperary

On the floor of a ruined chancel in County Tipperary, eight graveslabs and an open stone sarcophagus are arranged in two neat rows, as if the dead were still observing some kind of order.

The church at Tinvoher is ivy-covered and long out of use, but the stones laid into it speak to a burial tradition that persisted here across several centuries, from the late medieval period right into the 1640s.

The site sits on an east-facing slope in undulating countryside, with a ringwork to the west, a ringwork being an earthen or stone enclosure of early medieval origin, and a tower house to the east, placing the church at the centre of what was clearly a significant local complex. The church itself consists of a nave and chancel, with a barrel-vaulted tower added onto the eastern end of the chancel. It was substantial enough to appear in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Cashel in 1302. The seven graveslabs inside the chancel range from late medieval to seventeenth century, and two of the later pair, dated 1643 and 1644, are decorated with fleur-de-lis symbols, a motif more often associated with French heraldry but which appears with some regularity on Irish funerary stonework of the period. The particular slab documented here is a rectangular limestone piece, two metres long and just under two centimetres short of two-thirds of a metre wide. It carries an inscription in false relief running along its edge and a cross carved in relief at its centre, but both are now so poorly preserved that neither can be read or traced with any confidence. Whatever name or formula was once cut into the stone has been surrendered entirely to time and weather.

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Pete F
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