Cross, Tuitestown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Tuitestown, Co. Westmeath

In the south-east corner of Kenny graveyard in Tuitestown, inside a family burial plot, there lies a small limestone cross that is easy to walk past without a second glance.

It measures just sixty centimetres in height, with short arms that flare slightly outward from the shaft, and it has the look of something made by hand rather than by trade, roughly worked from local stone rather than shaped to any formal pattern. That combination of modest scale and crude finish is precisely what makes it worth pausing over.

The cross sits within the Daly family plot, south of Kenny Church, on the western end of a ridge above undulating pasture. The position is quietly commanding, with open views in every direction, and the graveyard itself occupies ground that clearly held significance long before the cross was placed here. Expanding-arm crosses of this kind, sometimes called ring-free or splayed-arm crosses, appear throughout early Irish ecclesiastical sites, though they vary considerably in quality of workmanship. This one falls firmly at the rougher end of the spectrum, suggesting either great age, local improvisation, or both. The limestone from which it is made would have been available in the surrounding landscape, and its comparatively small dimensions mean it was likely intended as a grave marker rather than a standing monument of the sort erected in more prominent positions within a churchyard.

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Pete F
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