Wall monument, Kilcredan, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Religious Objects
Inside Kilcredan church, two kneeling stone figures face one another across a rectangular frame on the north wall, locked in a posture of devotion that time has steadily dismantled.
Both figures have lost their heads and hands; the one on the left has lost much of its upper torso as well. The surrounding stonework is heavily weathered, and the only decorative detail still legible is the fluting along the lintel. A Latin inscription recorded by the historian Charles Smith in 1750 has since disappeared entirely. What remains is a monument that communicates loss in ways its makers almost certainly did not intend.
The two figures are Sir Edward Harris and his wife Elizabeth. Elizabeth died in 1622, Edward in 1636, and the monument was most likely carved to mark Edward's death, probably at roughly the same time as the Tynte tomb that sits directly opposite on the south side of the church. The family connection between the two monuments is close: Harris served as Chief Justice of Munster and Second Justice of the King's Bench, and his eldest daughter Philippa married Robert Tynte, whose monument faces her father's across the nave. The Harris monument carries no maker's signature, which was not unusual for provincial funerary carving of the early seventeenth century, and without the lost inscription there is now no way to recover whatever additional biographical or religious text Smith transcribed three centuries ago.
The church itself provides the immediate setting, and Cork County Council has erected a shelter over the nearby Tynte tomb. The Harris monument stands at the east end of the north wall, and the two monuments, facing one another across the interior, are best understood as a pair, the product of a single family's effort to mark two generations in the same space.