Memorial stone, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Memorials

Memorial stone, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary

On the north-east wall of St. Mary's Church of Ireland in Nenagh, just beside the door, a seventeenth-century wall plaque records the life of a woman whose family connections stretch back across the Irish Sea to the English county of Cheshire.

The plaque is modest in scale, roughly 1.2 metres high and 1.6 metres wide, yet it is carefully made: limestone and marble set beneath a segmental pediment with hood-moulding, flanked by volute brackets, the whole assembly resting on a red marble plinth supported by two corbels. The inscription itself is incised in Roman capitals, formal and deliberate, as was customary for memorial work of this kind.

The text names Mary Finch, daughter of one Pete Banell of Tabley in Cheshire, and records that she married Symon Finch on the fifth of August 1651. It also notes that her mother was sister to Sir Richard Grosvenor of Eaton in Cheshire, a detail that would have carried considerable social weight; the Grosvenors were a prominent landed family in that county. Mary died on the twenty-sixth of January 1679, at Kilcolman, in her fifty-ninth year. The plaque therefore memorialises a woman who had lived through some of the most turbulent decades of seventeenth-century Ireland, arriving as a settler connected to English gentry families and dying, after nearly three decades of marriage, at a named estate rather than in the town of Nenagh itself. The care taken with her monument, its architectural detailing and the precision of the biographical record it carries, speaks to the social standing her family wished to preserve in stone.

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Pete F
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