Tomb - chest tomb, Tallaght, Co. Dublin

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Tombs & Memorials

Tomb – chest tomb, Tallaght, Co. Dublin

In the old churchyard at Tallaght, a chest tomb sits close to where a font once stood, the two objects linked by a small detail recorded in early twentieth-century scholarship.

The font was referred to in historical notes as "the lossit", an archaic term that signals just how long this corner of south County Dublin has been accumulating layers of use and memory. A chest tomb, sometimes called an altar tomb, is a box-shaped stone monument raised above ground level, designed to evoke the form of a table or altar and to mark the burial place of a family of some local standing.

The tomb commemorates members of the Reilly family who died in the late seventeenth century, and it is one of several tombs from that period recorded within the same churchyard. The detail connecting it to the nearby font comes from research published by Fitzgerald between 1906 and 1908, which remains one of the key sources for understanding the monument. The churchyard itself, recorded under the site reference DU021-037004-, contains enough of these seventeenth-century survivals to suggest it was a place of considerable local importance during that period. The Reilly family tomb, catalogued separately, represents the kind of quietly significant funerary monument that tends to be overlooked in favour of grander or more legible memorials.

The churchyard at Tallaght is accessible to those willing to look carefully at what survives there. The chest tomb's proximity to the former font location is worth bearing in mind when moving through the site, as the spatial relationship between the two features is part of what the historical record preserves. Stone of this age weathers considerably, and inscriptions on seventeenth-century tombs can be difficult to read in flat light; visiting on an overcast day, when shadows are soft and even, sometimes makes carved lettering easier to trace. The monument was compiled into the national record by Geraldine Stout, and the site reference numbers provide a useful starting point for anyone consulting the wider archaeological inventory of the area.

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