Wall monument (present location), Boarmanshill, Co. Limerick

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Religious Objects

Wall monument (present location), Boarmanshill, Co. Limerick

A seventeenth-century memorial carved for a County Limerick family now sits, somewhat improbably, in a woodland glen where it has been built into the wall of a roofed shelter erected by Belgian monks.

The journey this limestone slab has made across several centuries and several miles is not the sort of thing that announces itself, and the modest structure that now houses it gives little away from the outside. Two carved fragments survive: the larger measures 0.7 metres high by 0.32 metres wide, the second 0.52 metres by 0.6 metres. Both are decorated with an image of St. Bernard and the symbols of the passion, the objects associated with the crucifixion, such as the cross, the nails, and the crown of thorns, that appear frequently in Counter-Reformation funerary carving.

The slabs originally formed part of a wall memorial belonging to the Walsh family, dated 1619, in Owney Abbey, a monastic site in County Limerick. At some point the stones were removed from that context and eventually came to Cappercullen Glen, where the Belgian monks of Glenstal Abbey incorporated them into the western wall of a modern roofed mass shelter they constructed over a mass-rock. A mass-rock is simply an outdoor flat stone, often in a remote or concealed spot, used as an improvised altar during the Penal period when Catholic worship was prohibited or severely restricted. The monks' decision to house the Walsh fragments here, beside a stream that marks the boundary between the townlands of Garranbane and Boarmanshill, gave the old stones a new liturgical setting not entirely unlike their original one.

The shelter sits in woodland in Cappercullen Glen, with Cappercullen Castle approximately 465 metres to the south-west. The site is tucked beside a stream, so the approach can be soft underfoot depending on the season, and the tree cover means it remains relatively dim even on a bright day. The carved details on the limestone, particularly the passion symbols, reward a close look once your eyes adjust; the figures are worn but legible, and the contrast between the seventeenth-century carving and the plainly modern construction around it is quietly arresting.

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