Cross-slab, Brockagh, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Brockagh, Co. Wicklow

Beneath the feet of every visitor stepping into the churchyard at Trinity Church, Brockagh, lies a piece of early Christian stonework that has been quietly erased by the very act of entry.

A large slab of mica-schist, measuring roughly 1.48 metres long and half a metre wide, serves as the top step of the stile into the graveyard. Incised near one end is a small Greek cross, cut in a single line, and there is said to be a second cross on the underside. The cross on the upper face has been almost entirely worn away by generations of feet passing over it.

The slab was documented by Patrick Healy in a 1972 unpublished OPW report on ancient monuments at Glendalough, where its dimensions and features were recorded in some detail. Healy noted a rebate, a narrow stepped groove, running down one long edge to a depth of 3.5 centimetres, with a shorter length of similar rebate along the other edge. These rebates suggest the stone may once have had a structural function, perhaps as a grave cover or architectural element, before it was repurposed at the stile. The Greek cross form, with four arms of equal length, is among the earliest cross types used in Irish ecclesiastical contexts, and its appearance here, however faint, places the slab within a long tradition of carved Christian markers in the Glendalough valley.

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