Graveslab, Blanchvillestown, Co. Kilkenny

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Blanchvillestown, Co. Kilkenny

At the east end of a ruined medieval chancel in County Kilkenny, a limestone slab lies flush with the ground, still more or less where it was set centuries ago.

It is a graveslab, the kind of marker that once covered a burial in a church floor, and its survival inside the walls of the old church at Kylebeg has protected it from the worst of the weather, even as time has taken its toll on the stone itself.

The slab is tapering, a shape common to medieval funerary stonework, running to just over 1.84 metres in length and narrowing from 0.65 metres at the head end to 0.23 metres at the foot. A broad chamfer, a bevelled edge cut at an angle to soften the transition between the upper face and the sides, runs around the perimeter. The stone has suffered: the top left corner is broken away entirely, the top right corner is fractured, and a diagonal crack runs across the lower section. What survives of the decoration is carefully incised rather than relief-carved. A cross rises up the face of the slab, its head triangular in form and finished at each of its four terminals with a fleur-de-lis, the stylised lily motif associated with medieval heraldry and ecclesiastical ornament. A small knop, a rounded protrusion, sits just beneath the cross-head where it meets the shaft, and the shaft itself ends in a further fleur-de-lis at its base. The combination of the triangular cross-head and the repeated fleur-de-lis terminals places this firmly within a tradition of Irish medieval grave sculpture, though the identity of whoever lies beneath has not been recorded.

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