Graveslab, Turlough, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Tombs & Memorials
Set into the wall of a church in Turlough, Co. Mayo, there is a slab whose message no one can now read.
A Latin inscription in Roman capitals covers its entire face, carved in false relief, meaning the letters were shaped by cutting away the surrounding stone rather than incising the text directly. Six regular rows of text run across the surface, each separated by a thin raised horizontal line, suggesting whoever commissioned it wanted something orderly and legible. The edges of the stone are broken, however, and with them goes whatever meaning the inscription once carried. The words survive but the sense does not.
The slab sits in a shallow square recess near the north end of the west wall of the church's south transept. Its style points to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, a period in Ireland when Latin funerary inscriptions on cut stone were used by families of some local standing to mark their dead in permanent and conspicuous terms. The stone is understood to be a fragment, which raises its own quiet questions: broken at some point, relocated or reused, set deliberately into this recess at an unknown date by unknown hands. Whether it was moved from elsewhere in the church or arrived from outside entirely, the original commemorative context has been lost along with the text itself.
The slab is visible within the south transept of the church at Turlough, a site that also encompasses a round tower and other medieval remains. The inscription, though incomplete, is legible enough as carving to reward close inspection, particularly the fine horizontal dividing lines and the regularity of the lettering, which speak to the craft involved even where the content now eludes us.