Tomb, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin

Co. Dublin |

Tombs & Memorials

Tomb, Dublin North City, Co. Dublin

A mural tablet fixed to the wall of a church is an easily overlooked thing, the kind of memorial that blends into stonework after a century or two and stops being read.

The one in Chapelizod's parish church is unusual not for any great elaboration of craft but for who it remembers: members of the Hierom family, gone in the seventeenth century, their name now almost entirely absent from local record and popular memory alike.

The historian F.E. Ball, writing in 1906, noted the tablet in passing while surveying the area around Chapelizod, a village that sits along the Liffey just west of Dublin city. The Hierom family themselves leave little trace beyond this single mention. What the tablet represents, though, is a fairly common impulse in seventeenth-century Ireland among families with sufficient means and social standing: the commissioning of a permanent interior monument rather than a freestanding grave marker, intended to fix the family name in the memory of the congregation for generations. Mural tablets of this period were typically set in stone or marble and carried inscriptions recording the names of the deceased along with familial relationships, sometimes with religious or moralising text. That this one survived at all is worth noting, given the upheavals that affected many Irish parish churches across the same centuries.

Chapelizod church is a working parish and not a ruin, so access to the interior depends on opening hours and scheduled services. The village itself is straightforward to reach from central Dublin, either by road along the Liffey or by a short journey on public transport. Anyone visiting specifically to see the tablet should look along the interior walls rather than the floor or the churchyard, and it is worth bearing in mind that Ball's description is now well over a century old. The condition and precise placement of such features can shift over time with renovation work, and a word with the parish may save some searching.

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