Graveslab, Town Parks, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
A flat stone lying a few metres from the east end of a Church of Ireland building might not seem like much, but this graveslab carries, faintly, the outlines of a medieval world.
Measuring 1.25 metres by 0.59 metres, it is decorated with a lozenge-shaped cross whose arms terminate in trefoils, rising from a curving calvary mount, the stepped or mounded base that conventionally represents Golgotha in medieval Christian iconography. Erosion has worn the carving down considerably, and whatever inscription may once have accompanied the design has either vanished or was never cut in the first place. A raised border, roughly 7.5 centimetres wide, runs around the edge. The stone lies in silence, largely unannounced, on the west side of the town north of Main Street.
The graveslab's context is what gives it weight. It almost certainly originates with the medieval church of St Nicholas of Myra that once stood on or very near this spot. That church survived, apparently in some form, until around 1813, when it was demolished and replaced by the Church of Ireland building that now stands here. The dedication to St Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop whose cult spread widely through medieval Europe, was not unusual in Irish parish churches, though it gives a particular flavour to what was evidently a long-established place of worship. When the old church came down, this slab, with its careful if now fading carving, remained behind. O'Flanagan, writing in 1930, recorded the outline of this transition, and the slab itself was documented by Farrelly and FitzPatrick in 1993.