Inscribed slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Religious Objects

Inscribed slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Built into the east wall of St Peakaun's church in Toureen is a fragment of stone so small it could be overlooked entirely, yet what survives on its face is a partial inscription that scholars believe preserves part of a personal name, interrupted by a cross.

The slab, catalogued as Toureen Peacaun 1, measures roughly 6 centimetres in height and just under 24 centimetres in width, with only about 4 centimetres of thickness visible where it sits embedded in the wall. On that exposed face, parts of four incised characters run in a single line. The fourth character is almost entirely lost, with only what appears to be the bottom left-hand corner of an outline cross still legible.

The stone was uncovered during excavation work at the site in 1944, reported by Duignan and subsequently noted by Macalister in 1949. Scholars Okasha and Forsyth, writing in 2001, drew attention to a detail that gives the inscription its quiet puzzle: the spacing of the letters suggests the visible text begins mid-name, with the letter D opening a second syllable. The first syllable, they reasoned, would have appeared on the other side of the now-fragmentary cross, on a portion of the slab that is either hidden within the wall or no longer survives. What we see, in other words, is the tail end of someone's name, split across a carved cross, the rest of the text swallowed by time and masonry.

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