Stone Cross, Ferns, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Crosses & Monuments

Stone Cross, Ferns, Co. Wexford

At some point before 1909, two granite cross heads were simply built into a graveyard wall at Ferns Cathedral in County Wexford, treated as convenient stonework rather than ancient sculpture.

A third was loose somewhere in the graveyard. That a collection of early medieval ringed crosses, the distinctive wheel-headed form familiar from sites across Ireland, should end up repurposed as rubble fill says something about how attitudes to such objects shifted over time.

The crosses are now re-erected at three points around the Cathedral, positioned to the west, northwest, and north of the building. They are plain examples of their type, consisting of bases and heads without figural carving, but finished with mouldings along their edges. The head of the northwest cross measures roughly 1.21 metres wide, 1.1 metres tall, and 0.35 metres thick. Whether the bases were moved at any stage is unclear; it is possible they were always in their current positions and only the heads had been displaced into the wall. The incorporation of early stonework into later boundary walls was not unusual in Irish ecclesiastical sites, where old carved stones were reused pragmatically for centuries before antiquarian interest prompted their retrieval and display.

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