Inscribed slab

The National Monuments Service's description

Situated immediately E of St.Cronán's Romanesque church (TN012-010001-) and presently surrounding the Church of Ireland church of St. Cronán's. The graveyard (TN012-010002-) contains a number of architectural fragments (TN012-010003-). Also discovered in the graveyard was one cross slab and one inscribed-slab (TN012-010004-; TN012-010015-).
Now missing inscribed slab described by Petrie as 'The stone...has disappeared, and no record of it has been found, except this rude sketch, made by a police-sergeant named Water, who lived in Roscrea twenty years ago, and whose letter, containing this drawing, was found among Dr. Petrie's papers after his death' (Petrie 1878, 39-40). According to Okasha & Forsyth `The stone was found in pieces in 1812 `When removing the foundation stones [of the twelfth-century church]' ... but it was already lost in 1878. It was drawn by Richard Molloy of Roscrea at some time between 1813 and 1815; this drawing is preserved in the RIA ... Another drawing of the stone, made by a local police-sergeant, Mr Water, and dating from about the 1850s, was found among Petrie's papers on his death in 1866 and published in 1878' (Okasha & Forsyth 2001, 217). The stone was a plain rectangular slab with no carving on it other than two lines of an inscription, this inscription reads [O~R~]DOUCHERBAILL O~R~D[O]RIGELE (Stokes 1878) which reads as OROIT DO U CHERBAILL OROIT DO RIG ELE. When translated this reads as 'A prayer for Ua Cerbaill, a prayer for the king of Éile' (Okasha & Forsyth 2001, 217-19).

Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien.

Date of upload: 22 September 2008

References

Petrie, G. 1878 Christian inscriptions in the Irish language. Chiefly collected and drawn by George Petrie, LL. D.; and edited by Margaret Stokes, 2 vols. Dublin.

Okasha, E. and Forsyth, K. 2001 Early Christian inscriptions of Munster: a corpus of the inscribed stones. Cork University Press.