Cross, Clonnageeragh, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Clonnageeragh, Co. Westmeath

Along a quiet road north of Fore, in County Westmeath, a damaged stone cross head lies tucked into a field bank, one arm broken away, its ring intact but plain.

It is not displayed, not interpreted, and not easy to find. What makes it quietly strange is how thoroughly it has dissolved into the landscape: a wayside cross, once upright and marking a route for travellers, now bedded into the earth like rubble, while its shaft and base have vanished entirely since they were last recorded.

The cross was known to the Victorian antiquarian George Victor Du Noyer, who drew it in the nineteenth century and recorded it as a Calvary cross on the roadside north of Fore Abbey, in the townland of Clonageeragh. By 1928 it had already come apart, described then as fragments of a head and shaft with a plain ring or disc roughly 45 centimetres in diameter, lying in a field north of a house on the west side of the road. A more detailed record from 1980 found three pieces still present: the head, part of the shaft, and a base stone with a deep socket cut into its upper surface to hold the shaft upright. The cross was entirely plain, with no inscription and no decorative carving; the shaft had chamfered edges, meaning its corners were cut at a slight angle, but otherwise it was unadorned. Even then the head was damaged, with only one arm surviving. By the time of a later visit, the head alone could be found, resting against the north-western face of a field bank; the base and shaft had gone. The cross sits within a loose cluster of similar monuments: another wayside cross lies roughly a kilometre to the north-north-west, and a second is about 800 metres to the south-south-east, suggesting this was once a marked route, possibly one associated with the medieval monastic settlement at Fore.

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