Cross, Macreddin, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Crosses & Monuments
In the wooded Aughrim river valley of County Wicklow, the townland of Macreddin quietly holds a monument classified simply as a cross.
That designation, spare as it is, places it within a tradition that runs deep in the Irish landscape: wayside crosses, grave markers, boundary crosses, and the remnants of more elaborate medieval stone carvings that have weathered centuries of rain and neglect into something harder to read than they once were. What exactly stands at Macreddin, and what its original purpose was, remains for the moment difficult to establish in any detail.
Macreddin itself is a small rural townland in the Wicklow uplands, part of a landscape shaped by both the gradual retreat of monastic culture and the later disruptions of plantation and land clearance. Crosses in this part of Ireland often served multiple functions over time, marking ecclesiastical boundaries, pilgrim routes, or the sites of early churches long since vanished. Without more specific information about this particular example, including its dimensions, its form, or when it was first recorded, it is not possible to say with confidence which of those histories it belongs to. It may be a simple incised stone, or something more elaborate; the record, at present, does not say.