Inscribed slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Religious Objects
Set into the interior east wall of St Peakaun's church in Toureen, County Tipperary, is a fragment of inscribed stone so small it could fit in a coat pocket.
Measuring roughly eight centimetres in height and just under twenty centimetres wide, it is broken on all four sides, meaning whatever it once was, whether grave marker, votive slab, or something else entirely, its original form is now lost. What survives on its visible face is a pair of parallel horizontal lines, interpreted by scholars as guide-lines laid down to keep a scribe's lettering straight, the kind of ruled preparation a craftsman would make before cutting a single line of text. The text itself, if it was ever completed, is gone.
The stone was uncovered in 1944 during an excavation at the site, with the find recorded by Duignan that same year and subsequently noted by Macalister in 1949. It was catalogued more recently by Okasha and Forsyth in 2001, who listed it as Toureen Peacaun 6, placing it within a broader corpus of early medieval inscribed stones from the area. St Peakaun's church is itself a site of some antiquity, and small inscribed fragments of this kind are often associated with early Christian monastic activity, where stone-cutting and literacy overlapped in the production of memorial or devotional objects. The fact that only the guide-lines remain, with no legible inscription, gives the piece an oddly suspended quality, as though the carver simply stopped.