Wall monument (present location), Lisglassock, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Religious Objects

Wall monument (present location), Lisglassock, Co. Longford

Set into the wall at the entrance to a farmyard beside Lisglassock House in County Longford, there is a stone plaque that almost certainly does not belong there.

It measures roughly 63 centimetres tall and 51 centimetres wide, and across its face runs a Latin inscription carved in relief, the letters raised from the stone in the Roman manner. The text reads: "Faemina virque torus vivos quos iunxerat unus uno hoc in tumulo faemina virque jacent," which translates as "a wife and husband whom one bed had joined when alive lie in this one tomb a wife and husband." It is, in other words, a funerary monument, a small and considered epitaph for two people whose names have been entirely lost.

On stylistic grounds the plaque has been dated to somewhere between 1550 and 1600, placing it in the late Tudor period, when Latin memorial inscriptions of this kind were not uncommon among the gentry and ecclesiastical communities of Ireland. What makes this one genuinely puzzling is that its original location is unknown. It was not made for a farmyard wall; it was made for a tomb. Somewhere, presumably, there is or was a burial site, a church, a vault, or a chapel with which this monument was associated, but no record connects it to any specific place. At some point, for reasons that have not been traced, it was moved to Lisglassock and built into the existing masonry, where it has remained.

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Pete F
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