Graveslab, Town Parks, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Tombs & Memorials
Embedded in the inner face of a boundary wall in a Church of Ireland churchyard, there is a fragment of medieval limestone that most people walking past would never notice.
It measures roughly 0.8 metres by 0.6 metres, and carved into its surface are the remnants of a cross shaft and a partial marginal inscription reading BVRCE, the surviving letters of what was once a name belonging to someone now otherwise unrecorded.
The slab originally formed part of the furnishings or burial markers of the medieval church of St. Nicholas of Myra, which stood on the west side of the town, north of Main Street. The church appears to have survived in some form until around 1813, when it was demolished to make way for a Church of Ireland building on the same site. Medieval graveslabs of this type were typically flat, inscribed stones laid over or set near a burial, often bearing a cross motif and a marginal text running around the edge that named the deceased and sometimes requested a prayer for their soul. When the old structure came down, this fragment was not discarded but incorporated into the new western boundary wall, face inward, where it has remained ever since. The partial name, rendered in the medieval Latin convention of replacing U with V, most likely refers to a member of the Burke family, one of the prominent Anglo-Norman dynasties who held significant influence across Munster and Connacht from the thirteenth century onward. Whether it marked their grave or merely commemorated them, the slab is now the only physical trace of whoever BVRCE was.