Headstone, Townparks, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Religious Objects

Headstone, Townparks, Co. Longford

In a graveyard in the village of Newtownforbes, Co. Longford, a small sandstone headstone preserves the kind of partial record that history routinely leaves behind.

It measures just 0.7 metres wide and 0.35 metres high, barely larger than a modest book propped upright in the ground, and its inscription is only partly legible. The text begins with reasonable confidence, then dissolves: the day and month of death are lost, leaving only the year, 1698, intact.

The stone marks the burial of one John Frazer, who died sometime in that year. Beyond the name and date, the inscription offers nothing further, and the gaps in the carving, where the day and month once were, suggest that erosion or damage has taken its toll over more than three centuries. Sandstone, while workable and locally available, is not especially resistant to weathering, which may explain why so much of what was once cut into its surface has since been worn smooth. The headstone sits to the south of the church in Newtownforbes, within a graveyard that has clearly been in use since at least the late seventeenth century. The name Frazer, or Fraser, was not uncommon in this part of Ireland during the period, and the formal phrasing of the inscription, "here lyeth interrd the body of", follows a convention typical of Protestant memorial stones from that era, though nothing in the surviving text confirms the religious affiliation of the deceased with certainty.

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