Inscribed slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Religious Objects

Inscribed slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Set into the interior east wall of a church at Toureen in County Tipperary is a small fragment of inscribed stone, its full original shape unknown, its text incomplete.

What survives is modest almost to the point of invisibility: roughly ten centimetres high, about seven and a half wide, and only a centimetre and a half of thickness visible where it sits flush with the surrounding masonry. Yet across that small exposed face, incised lettering covers most of the available surface, the remnant of something that was once meant to be read in full.

Scholars Elisabeth Okasha and Katherine Forsyth, writing in 2001, catalogued it among a group of early inscribed stones associated with the site, listing it as Toureen Peacaun 24. Early Christian inscribed slabs of this kind, typically carved with Latin or occasionally Irish text, were used in Ireland from roughly the sixth century onwards, often to mark graves or commemorate individuals within a monastic or ecclesiastical community. That this particular fragment was preserved at all, built into a church wall rather than lost to the ground, suggests someone at some point recognised it as worth keeping, even if its original context had already been obscured by then. The incomplete text adds a particular quality of unresolved curiosity; whatever was once recorded here, only a portion of it remains legible.

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