Cross, Curraghnagap, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Curraghnagap, Co. Sligo

Along the main street of Easky, a small coastal village in County Sligo, a stretch of modern mortared stone wall conceals something considerably older.

Built into the parapet of that wall is a subrectangular stone slab, just under a metre long and roughly half a metre wide, into which a rectangular socket has been carefully cut. That socket, measuring 42 centimetres in length and 16 centimetres across, once held a standing cross upright. The base sits flush with the western face of the wall but protrudes a quarter of a metre on the eastern side, suggesting it was incorporated into the wall's construction rather than always intended to sit there. Ivy has since claimed part of it.

Cross bases of this kind are the surviving lower portions of free-standing stone crosses, the socket designed to receive and stabilise the shaft above. They turn up across Ireland in various states of preservation, sometimes still paired with their crosses, more often orphaned as this one appears to be. What makes this particular example quietly telling is its situation: absorbed into an ordinary boundary wall on a village street, its original context and precise date unknown, its function reduced from the devotional or commemorative to the purely structural. The stone itself has outlasted whatever it once supported and whatever arrangement first gave it meaning.

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Pete F
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