Cross-slab, Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly
Co. Offaly |
Crosses & Monuments
Most of the grave-slabs at Clonmacnoise carry an inscription, a name cut into stone that anchors the object to a specific person and moment.
This one does not. It stands 1.75 metres tall, fixed now to the north wall of the Cathedral, and its only language is visual: an outline cross with a circular centre filled with a debased petal pattern, foliage curling around the stem and the top of the cross, and a rectangular base decorated with a tegulated, or tile-like, overlapping scale design. The absence of any text gives it a slightly anonymous quality, unusual even within a collection of early medieval stonework where anonymity is fairly common.
The slab is Romanesque in style, placing it broadly within the twelfth century, when that ornamental vocabulary of interlace, foliage, and geometric patterning was being absorbed into Irish ecclesiastical art. Clonmacnoise, on the east bank of the Shannon in County Offaly, was one of the great monastic centres of early Christian Ireland, and its collection of carved grave-slabs is among the largest and most significant to survive anywhere in the country. This particular stone was catalogued as CLN00464 in the 1992 Clonmacnoise grave-slab inventory, compiled by the Office of Public Works, with the evidence of its discovery attributed to Davis in 1984. It is worn and flaked, as one would expect from a piece of this age, but it remains in one piece, which is itself something worth noting given how fragile thin-section stonework of this kind tends to become over centuries of exposure.
The slab is displayed inside the Cathedral rather than left in the open air, which has almost certainly helped its survival. Visitors to the site who work their way along the north wall of that building will find it mounted at eye level, close enough to make out the faint but still legible foliage carving around the cross. The petal pattern at the centre is the most worn element, reduced to a suggestion of its original form, but the overall composition reads clearly enough to appreciate what the carver was attempting.