Tomb - effigial, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny

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Tombs & Memorials

Tomb – effigial, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny

In the south-east corner of a Church of Ireland building in Gowran, County Kilkenny, a medieval knight lies in stone, incomplete and quietly overlooked.

The effigy is carved in raised relief on a tapering limestone slab, measuring 1.65 metres in length, and shows the upper body and head of a armoured figure, his sword visible beside him. The mid-section and base of the slab are lost, leaving the knight as a kind of fragment, present enough to read but broken enough to unsettle.

The slab dates, according to art historian John Hunt writing in 1974, to the 13th or early 14th century. Hunt's description is precise and worth dwelling on: the knight's head rests on a rectangular cushion with tassels at the corners and rosettes to either side. He wears a surcoat, and the large, rounded form of his head represents a mail coif, the close-fitting hood of chain mail worn beneath a helmet during that period. Running down the centre of the figure is a floriated cross in high relief, meaning a cross whose arms terminate in leaf or flower forms, a motif common in high-status medieval carving. The slab itself is bordered by a roll-moulding, with a chamfered edge approximately six centimetres wide. The church in which it lies is a 19th-century Church of Ireland building, but it was constructed on the former chancel of the 13th-century church of St Mary's, so the effigy has, in a sense, remained within its original ecclesiastical territory across several centuries of rebuilding and rededication.

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