Graveslab, Town Parks, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Town Parks, Co. Tipperary

Among three limestone graveslabs lying to the north of a Church of Ireland building on the west side of a Tipperary town, one slab in particular rewards careful attention.

It is broken across the middle, the lower half lost, and what survives measures just over a metre in length. Yet the upper portion preserves an elaborately worked eight-armed banded cross with fleur-de-lys terminals and a barred knop, a decorative boss at the centre. A circle is superimposed across the arms, and where that circle divides the cross into segments, sunbursts fill each one except for a single segment containing a crescent moon. The contrast between sun and moon in that quiet pairing is easy to overlook, but it is the kind of iconographic detail that repays a second look.

The slab marks the resting place of Thomas Butler, Esquire, described in the marginal inscription as the son of a figure whose name is now lost where the stone has faded or broken away. The inscription runs around the edge of the slab in Black Letter script, the angular gothic typeface common on late medieval monuments, and switches into English rather than the Latin that earlier memorials typically used, suggesting a date somewhere in the later medieval or early modern period. The church over which these slabs once kept watch was the medieval foundation of St Nicholas of Myra, a dedication that points to considerable antiquity. That church is recorded as having survived until around 1813, when it was demolished and replaced by a Church of Ireland building. The three graveslabs, aligned roughly northwest to southeast, remained in place north of the west end of the new structure, outlasting the walls that once enclosed them.

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