Wall monument, Cashel, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Religious Objects

Wall monument, Cashel, Co. Tipperary

Just inside the entrance to the Bolton Library in Cashel, a small limestone figure sits propped on a graveslab without a head.

She stands 76 centimetres tall, hands raised and pressed together at the breast in the posture of prayer, though the hands themselves are broken. Nobody has recorded her name, and the monument she once formed part of has long since come apart. What remains is quietly precise: a woman in late Renaissance dress, carved with evident care, now resting in a graveyard alcove as a fragment of something larger.

The figure dates most likely to the seventeenth century and would originally have been set into a wall monument, a type of memorial common in Irish churches of the period in which sculpted figures, heraldic panels, and inscribed tablets were arranged together in tiers against an interior wall. The style of dress she wears places her in that era with some confidence: a pleated gown with a wide skirt over what appears to be a doublet with padded and ruffed sleeves, and a narrow ruched projecting collar of the kind fashionable across Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The location is St. John's Church of Ireland Cathedral, which itself stands on the site of a medieval church, adjacent to the more famous Rock of Cashel. The Bolton Library, named for Archbishop Theophilus Bolton who donated his substantial book collection to Cashel in the eighteenth century, occupies a building within the cathedral precincts, and the headless figure now sits just to the west of its entrance.

Visitors to the cathedral grounds who walk as far as the Bolton Library door will find her there on the graveslab, easy to overlook but worth a close look. The costume detail in particular rewards attention; the carved ruffing and pleating show a sculptor working at a level of finish that the figure's current, unanchored situation does little to suggest.

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Pete F
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