Tomb - chest tomb (present location), Leggetsrath, Co. Kilkenny

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Tombs & Memorials

Tomb – chest tomb (present location), Leggetsrath, Co. Kilkenny

Sitting in an OPW storage depot in Kilkenny rather than any church or graveyard, a small limestone fragment carries what remains of a late medieval Crucifixion scene.

The piece measures just 18 centimetres long and 23 centimetres high, yet it preserves, in false relief, the carved head and torso of Our Lady. She wears a mantle, or brat, the traditional Irish outer cloak, rendered in stylised folds over her head and clasped at her chest, with her hands just visible at the point where the stone has broken away. A flat raised border frames the panel. A companion fragment, held in the same depot, carries the lower portion of the same scene, with Christ on the cross at the centre and St John to one side. Together they once formed the end slab of a chest tomb, the box-shaped above-ground tomb type common in late medieval Irish ecclesiastical settings, associated with Leggetsrath in County Kilkenny.

The carving belongs to a recognisable tradition. John Hunt, writing in 1974, noted a closely comparable end slab from St Patrick's Cathedral in Cashel, County Tipperary, which he described as a late, degenerate production connected with the O'Tunney workshop. The O'Tunneys were a dynasty of stone carvers who dominated ecclesiastical sculpture in the Kilkenny and Tipperary region during the sixteenth century, and their influence extended to works produced after the family's main period of activity. The stylistic similarities place the Leggetsrath fragment in the late sixteenth century, a period when that workshop's compositional conventions were still being followed, if with less precision than in earlier generations. The piece is a small but legible trace of how funerary sculpture circulated and persisted in this part of Leinster long after the workshops that inspired it had passed their peak.

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