Graveslab, Killaloe, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Killaloe, Co. Kilkenny

In a rectangular graveyard in Killaloe, County Kilkenny, a coffin-shaped slab of red sandstone has been pushed upright into the earth to serve as a headstone, pressed into service for a burial that came centuries after the slab itself was made.

That recycling is what makes it quietly odd: an object originally fashioned as a grave marker in the 13th or 14th century was later repurposed to mark somebody else entirely, its original occupant long forgotten, its own funerary identity subordinated to a newer one.

The slab is about a metre above ground, half a metre wide, and roughly twenty centimetres thick. Carved into its face is an alisée patée cross-head, a four-armed cross where each arm broadens outward to an expanded terminal, the whole contained within a circle. A knop, a small decorative knob or boss, sits on the shaft below the cross-head, and a raised border runs around the edge of the slab. The underside has been left roughly cut, as was typical when the surface facing the earth was considered unimportant. Both the coffin shape of the slab and the particular style of that cross decoration point to a medieval date, most likely somewhere in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. A second graveslab of similar date survives elsewhere in the same graveyard, suggesting this was once a reasonably well-appointed burial ground associated with a medieval church whose remains still stand nearby. Red sandstone, the material chosen here, was a common local choice in parts of Kilkenny and Tipperary for ecclesiastical carving during this period, lending the surviving stonework a distinctive warm, slightly russet colouring where weathering has not obscured it.

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