Wall monument, Gardens, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Religious Objects
In the medieval chancel of St Mary's parish church in Kilkenny, a small limestone panel sits embedded in the southern wall, positioned above a tomb niche that dates to the thirteenth century.
The panel itself is modest in size, just over sixty centimetres on each side, but it carries a quiet complexity: cut in false relief, a technique that creates the impression of depth without fully carving through the stone, it displays a heraldic achievement showing the arms of the Shee family impaling those of the Fagan family. At the base of the shield, on either side, are the initials "R S".
The plaque is dated tentatively to 1608 and is associated, again tentatively, with a Richard Shee. The double qualification is worth noting; both the name and the date carry question marks in the record, which lends the object an air of careful scholarly honesty rather than confident attribution. The stone itself is fossiliferous limestone, meaning it preserves the traces of ancient marine creatures within its fabric, which gives even the material a kind of layered history. Beneath the panel, within the older tomb niche, there may be the buried remains of a ledger stone, a flat memorial slab typically laid over a grave, though its presence has not been confirmed. A separate tomb associated with Richard Shee survives nearby in the same church, suggesting that this wall monument formed part of a broader commemorative arrangement, the Shee family marking their presence in St Mary's across more than one monument and perhaps more than one generation.
