Tomb, Nunsacre, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Tombs & Memorials
A place called Nunsacre carries its ecclesiastical past in its very name, and the field there once held something worth marking on a map with unusual bluntness: simply "Tomb".
That is what the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded for the site in County Galway, associated with the remains of a nunnery in the same townland. By the time of the 1945 to 1946 revision, the designation had quietly shifted to "Tomb (Site of)", a small cartographic admission that whatever had once stood there was no longer quite present.
What had been there was a graveslab, and it was a notable one. H. S. Crawford, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1913, described a long tapering stone approximately 1.67 metres in length and between 0.37 and 0.52 metres wide. Carved into its face was a four-line cross with what Crawford called an expanded centre, foliated extremities, and a stepped base, decorative features characteristic of early medieval Irish ecclesiastical stonework. Around the cross ran an inscription in two lines on each side of the slab, though Crawford found it entirely undecipherable. The slab's connection to the nunnery is circumstantial but suggestive; early Irish nunneries, like their male counterparts, often produced or commissioned carved grave markers for their communities. The stone no longer lies at Nunsacre. It has been removed from its original location and is now kept inside the doorway of Clonfert Cathedral, a short distance away in the same county, where it can still be seen.