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, is a fragment of stone so small it could easily be mistaken for rubble.

It measures roughly nine centimetres tall and thirteen centimetres wide, with only about five millimetres of its thickness visible above the surrounding masonry. What makes it remarkable is what covers nearly its entire exposed face: the remnant of an incised text, its original form and full meaning no longer recoverable, pressed into the stone by hands whose names we do not know.

The fragment was uncovered during an excavation in 1944, carried out by Duignan, and later catalogued by the scholars Okasha and Forsyth in 2001 as Toureen Peacaun 11, one of a series of inscribed stones associated with this early ecclesiastical site. The slab is described as a fragment of unknown original form, meaning scholars cannot say with certainty whether it was once part of a grave marker, a dedicatory inscription, or something else entirely. What survives is only a portion of the text, incised rather than raised, running across most of the visible surface. Inscribed slabs of this kind are associated with the early medieval Irish church, where Latin or occasionally ogham script was used to mark burials or commemorate individuals, though without more of the text intact, this particular stone keeps its purpose to itself.

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