Wall monument, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Religious Objects

Wall monument, Gowran, Co. Kilkenny

Fixed to the east wall of the north aisle in the medieval church of St Mary's, Gowran, is a Renaissance wall monument that does something unusual: it commemorates one man and both of his wives simultaneously, and it does so with a couplet of verse that is wry to the point of being slightly unsettling.

Carved in raised Roman capitals beneath the heraldry, the inscription concludes, "Both wifves at once alive he could not have: Both to injoy at once he made this grave." It is a joke of sorts, the kind of thing that reads differently depending on how generously you take it, and it has been sitting quietly on that wall since December 1646.

The monument was erected by James Keally, described in the inscription as a gentleman "sometime of the Towne of Gawran." His first wife, Ellen Nashe, died on 30 July 1640; the date of his second wife Mary White's death, and of Keally's own, were left blank, the blanks still unfilled when the monument was transcribed by the historian Carrigan in 1905. The structure itself is substantial, standing 2.1 metres high and 1.41 metres wide in polished limestone, with a carved frieze, a moulded entablature decorated with raised flowers, and an inverted shield pediment at the top. Heraldic shields flank the central recessed plaque on either side of its semi-circular head: one impales the Keally arms, two lions rampant supporting a triple-towered castle, with three doves carrying olive branches for Nash; the other pairs the same Keally arms with a chevron between three roses for White. The monument sits on an altar-type base nearly a metre high, giving the whole composition a formal, almost theatrical presence within the aisle. The church itself dates to the thirteenth century, and a comparable wall monument from the same period survives in a seventeenth-century mortuary chapel attached to the south wall of the nave.

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