Architectural fragment, Callan, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Architectural fragment, Callan, Co. Kilkenny

In the chancel of St Mary's parish church in Callan, a collection of limestone fragments lies loose on the floor, detached from whatever structures they once formed and now existing as a kind of quiet puzzle.

They are not displayed or labelled; they simply sit there, the remnants of larger things, their original contexts severed and only partly recoverable.

The pieces are varied enough to suggest they came from more than one source. One rectangular block, roughly half a metre tall, carries a monogram in false relief, the letters IHC rendered in interlace, a Christogram used widely in ecclesiastical carving as an abbreviation of the name of Jesus. Another block, smaller, appears to be a fragment of an entablature, the horizontal band that typically sits above columns in classical or classically influenced architecture, and is decorated with a raised lozenge on each of its three carved faces. A third fragment, only about 28 centimetres long, shows the lower portion of a flowing robe and, beside it, part of a column, suggesting it may once have formed part of a chest tomb panel, the kind of carved stone box monument placed over a grave that was common in Irish churches from the medieval period onward. There is also a moulded plinth, a small engaged corbel with punch tooling, a fragment of window tracery, and a pyramidal limestone piece similarly worked with punch tooling within plain margins. Taken together, the fragments point toward funerary and architectural monuments of some elaboration, though precisely when they were made or to whom any memorial element belonged remains uncertain.

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Pete F
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