Cross-slab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

On a small island in Lough Derg, mounted against the interior wall of a ruined medieval church, sits a carved stone slab that most visitors would walk past without a second glance.

It is not large, measuring just under a metre in height and a third of a metre wide, and part of its top has broken away at some point over the centuries. What makes it worth pausing over is the quality and character of the carving itself: a Latin cross whose angles are hollowed out with precise circular cuttings, and whose base is left deliberately open, a design detail that places it firmly within a recognisable tradition of early Irish ecclesiastical stonework.

The slab is fixed to the east wall of the nave of St. Caimin's church, on the return just before the entrance into the chancel. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1916 to 1917, catalogued it as being of twelfth-century type, which would place its carving during a period of considerable activity in Irish monastic art and architecture. Inishcaltra, known also as Holy Island, was a significant early Christian monastic site, and St. Caimin's church is one of several ecclesiastical structures that survive there in various states of ruin. Cross-slabs of this kind were commonly used as grave markers or devotional stones in early Irish monasteries, often carved with incised crosses whose formal variations, such as the ringed hollows at the angles here, can help scholars roughly date and categorise them.

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