Tomb - chest tomb, Donaghmore, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Tombs & Memorials
In the south-east corner of the chancel at Donaghmore church in County Kilkenny, there sits a chest tomb, a box-shaped funerary monument typical of late medieval and early modern Ireland.
The problem is that the tomb there now is made of concrete. What once occupied that corner, a stone monument dating to around 1600, has been replaced by a modern construction, and the original may survive only in fragments.
The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded the original tomb and transcribed its Latin inscription in raised letters: 'THEBALDVS. BVTLRVS. ET. VXOR. EIVS. MARGARETA. PATRICII. HOC. SEPVL.' He translated this as commemorating Theobald Butler and his wife Margaret Fitzpatrick, who commissioned the tomb for themselves. The Butler name connects this monument to one of the most prominent dynasties in medieval Munster and Leinster, and a date of around 1600 places it at a period of considerable upheaval in the region. Against the south wall, just to the west of the concrete replacement, a medieval stone slab survives. It appears to be a portion of a mensa, the flat stone top of an altar or tomb, and may well be a surviving fragment of the very monument Carrigan described. If so, it is an odd kind of relic: the inscription and its dedicatees known from a century-old transcription, while the physical object has been partly displaced and partly lost to a later, utilitarian replacement.