Tomb - effigial, Ardfert, Co. Kerry

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Tombs & Memorials

Tomb – effigial, Ardfert, Co. Kerry

In the chancel of Ardfert Cathedral lies a slab that is easy to walk past without fully registering what it depicts.

Roughly 144 centimetres long and tapering from 57 centimetres at the wide end to 38 at the narrow, this limestone grave marker carries, at its broader end, the carved head of a bishop set beneath an ogee-headed canopy, a pointed arch with curved, flowing sides that was fashionable in Gothic ecclesiastical carving. The canopy is multi-cusped and pinnacled, worked in deep false relief, and tucked into its cusps are three small subsidiary heads. The left spandrel, the triangular space between the arch and its surrounding frame, holds a circular trefoil design; the right has a worn circular motif that resists easy reading. The lower left corner of the slab is missing entirely.

The identity of the figure has never been firmly established. John Hunt, writing in 1974, described the carving carefully: a mitred head flanked by five smaller heads beneath an ogee cusped arch, with an inturned crozier on the right side and what may be a spear on the left, though Hunt himself expressed uncertainty about the latter. He judged the style provincial and placed the slab in the early fourteenth century, an assessment broadly consistent with the thirteenth-to-fourteenth-century date range otherwise assigned to it. The Ardfert complex was the seat of the Diocese of Kerry, and the cathedral, dedicated to Saint Brendan, was one of the most significant ecclesiastical sites in Munster during the medieval period, which makes an episcopal commemoration here entirely plausible. A drawing of the slab by the antiquarian illustrator William F. Wakeman, made in 1894 and reproduced in a publication by Hickson the following year, preserves something of its appearance at a time when the carving, already described as much worn and defaced, was marginally more legible than it is today.

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