Tomb - chest tomb, Rathbeagh, Co. Kilkenny

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Tombs & Memorials

Tomb – chest tomb, Rathbeagh, Co. Kilkenny

Scattered across a graveyard at Rathbeagh, Co. Kilkenny, are three limestone panels that were once a single chest tomb, a type of box-shaped raised monument common in late medieval and early modern Ireland.

They are no longer assembled. Each panel has been repurposed as a grave-marker, set on end or laid flat in different corners of the burial ground, so that the tomb's original form must be reconstructed in the imagination. What survives, though, is a remarkable quantity of carved decoration, distributed across the three separated pieces like chapters of a book pulled apart and shelved in the wrong order.

The end panel carries a scene of the Crucifixion set within a semi-pointed arch: Christ on the cross, with Our Lady to his right in a long, heavily pleated dress and a large veil, and St John to his left, possibly holding a corner of his cloak as if to wipe away tears. The top panel, which likely served as the lid, shows the shaft of a cross rising from a Calvary mound with a skull at its base, interlaced knotwork climbing vertical bars, and the remains of a Latin inscription in raised Gothic lettering around the border. That inscription, transcribed by the historian William Carrigan in 1905, identifies the tomb as commemorating Theobald Purcell of Cloine and his wife Katherine Purcell. Carrigan also recorded, apparently from an earlier condition of the lid, carvings of the sun and moon, an IHS monogram, and two shields, one bearing two boars' heads, with the date 1613 cut above them. The third panel, the large side piece, is decorated with instruments of the Passion, a pierced heart, a cock, a pot, a pillar, a scourge, and pincers, images associated in Catholic devotional art with the suffering of Christ in the hours before his death. Each symbol is contained within a broad plain border, giving the panel a spare, almost heraldic quality.

The graveyard sits on the brow of a gentle east-facing slope, and the panels are distributed around the ruined church at its centre, the end panel to the south-west, the lid panel to the south, and the side panel to the south-east. Visitors who know what they are looking for will find the full set within a short distance of one another, though none of them signals its significance from a distance. The interlaced knotwork and Passion symbols reward close inspection, as does the faint Gothic lettering on the lid panel's border, partially buried as it is in the ground.

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