Graveslab, Limerick City, Co. Limerick

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Limerick City, Co. Limerick

In the graveyard of St John's in Limerick city, there is an old graveslab that the locals once called the Slipper Stone, and the name alone is enough to make you stop and look more carefully.

Carved into it are two symbols associated with the brogue-maker's trade, a brogue being the traditional Irish shoe; the sole of a brogue and a cutting instrument used in its making. It is an unusual choice of memorial iconography, and it suggests that whoever commissioned the stone wanted their craft remembered as plainly as their name.

The inscription carved around the slab's edges is in Latin, winding from the top down the right-hand side, up the left edge, and finishing in four short lines beneath the name Philippus. Written out in full, it reads: Philip, son of Maurice Capuc, erected this monument, to whose soul God be merciful, Amen. Fogerty, writing in 1913, noted that the lettering is crude and mixes Roman capitals with old English script, and he dated the slab to the early seventeenth century on that basis. He also observed a small but telling detail: the letter l in Philippus is carved upside down. A photograph taken between 1910 and 1912 shows the stone narrowing towards one end in the manner typical of sixteenth or seventeenth century graveslabs, and the Urban Survey of 1989 suggested it may originally have formed part of a table tomb, which is a raised chest-like grave monument common in that period. The partial surname, Capuc, remains unresolved, its full form obscured by damage or abbreviation.

The stone sits within the graveyard attached to St John's, which lies in the older southern quarter of Limerick city. The graveyard is not large, and the slab is not prominently displayed, so it rewards a slow, methodical look around rather than a quick scan. The carving is shallow in places and the inscription runs in an unconventional direction, so tracing the text with your eye takes a moment to orient. It is the kind of object that repays patience; the upside-down letter, the shoemaker's tools, the half-legible surname, each detail adding a little more texture to an already quietly peculiar memorial.

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