Inscribed slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Religious Objects

Inscribed slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Set into the interior east wall of St Peakaun's church in Toureen, County Tipperary, there is a fragment of stone so small it could easily be mistaken for ordinary rubble.

It measures roughly sixteen centimetres high and twenty-six centimetres wide, with barely two centimetres of its face visible where it sits embedded in the masonry. What makes it worth a second look is what appears on that exposed surface: one complete letter and the remnants of two others, the surviving trace of an inscription whose original form and purpose remain unknown.

The slab came to light during an excavation carried out in 1944, documented by Duignan and later by Macalister in 1949. Scholars Okasha and Forsyth, writing in 2001, catalogued it as Toureen Peacaun 3, placing it in a series of inscribed stones associated with the site. Because so little of the stone is visible, and because it is a fragment of something larger that no longer survives intact, the inscription cannot be read in any meaningful sense. It sits in that particular category of early medieval carved stones where the evidence is just substantial enough to confirm that something was once written, and not quite substantial enough to say what.

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