Cross, Clonnageeragh, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Clonnageeragh, Co. Westmeath

What stands beside a road north of Fore is not really a cross at all, at least not the original one.

A limestone socket stone, a flat rectangular block with a hole cut clean through it to receive a shaft, sits near a bend in the road in the townland of Clonnageeragh. The cross that once stood in it is gone, replaced at some point by a modern substitute. The head of the original cross is, in all likelihood, cemented to a wall inside a church several kilometres away, where only one of its faces can now be seen.

The nineteenth-century artist and geologist George Victor Du Noyer recorded this wayside cross while it was still largely intact, producing a drawing that captures what has since been lost. At that time the cross head retained a six-rayed star or cross set within a circle on one face, and the remains of a sunk trefoil pattern on the other. By 1928, when H. S. Crawford described it in print, the head was already in worse condition than Du Noyer's drawing suggested, though it was still present: a portion of a ring-headed cross with a flat socket stone roughly 0.6 metres square. By 1976, only the base and a fragment of a chamfered arm survived beside what was by then a disused road. By 1980, even that fragment had vanished, leaving only the socket stone lying in the field. The cross head now fixed to the east wall of the chancel of St. Feichin's Church in Fore bears a quatrefoil cross in double outline within a chamfered circular frame, which corresponds closely enough to Crawford's description to suggest it is the missing piece, though cemented in place as it is, the reverse face cannot be checked.

The socket stone itself has been shifted roughly forty metres from its original position, as comparison with the six-inch Ordnance Survey map makes clear. It now sits at the bend in the road rather than in the field to the west where earlier accounts place it. This stretch of county Westmeath was evidently once marked by several such wayside crosses, the kind of small limestone boundary and devotional markers that punctuated rural roads; at least three others are recorded within a kilometre in either direction. The Fore end of this cluster, St. Feichin's Church, is worth visiting if only to see the cross head mounted on its chancel wall, even if the cement obscures whatever carvings survive on the other side.

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