Cross-slab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

On the island of Inis Cealtra, set in the waters of Lough Derg on the Shannon, a flat stone slab lies face-up in a corner of a graveyard reserved, by tradition, for saints.

The slab is not standing, not mounted, not displayed in any conventional sense; it simply rests on the ground, which is itself part of what makes it worth pausing over. Carved into its surface is an outline Latin cross with hollowed angles, meaning the four inner corners where the arms meet the shaft have been scooped out rather than left solid, giving the design a slightly architectural quality. The cross also has a square base that is open at the bottom, a detail that sounds minor until you crouch down and look at it properly.

The scholar R. A. S. Macalister recorded the slab in 1916 to 1917, cataloguing it as number 61 in his survey of the site and assigning it to a twelfth-century type. At just under five feet long and a little over a foot wide, it is a modest object by any measure, yet its placement in the western half of the Saints' graveyard on this island, which was one of the most significant early Christian monastic sites in the west of Ireland, gives it a particular weight. Cross-slabs of this kind, flat stones incised with a cross rather than carved in relief or raised as free-standing monuments, were commonly used as grave markers across early medieval Ireland, and the hollowed-angle style Macalister identified here is consistent with work from the Romanesque period, when Irish stone-carvers were absorbing influences from continental Europe while maintaining distinctly local forms.

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