Cross-slab, Inchcleraun, Co. Longford

This particular stone once stood on Inchcleraun, a small island in Lough Ree on the Longford-Roscommon border, within an early medieval ecclesiastical enclosure that held several small churches. It no longer stands there at all, having been removed along with three companion slabs into the care of the Office of Public Works, where it now sits in a depot in Athenry, County Galway, considerably further from its origins than most early Christian stonework ever travels.

F. J. Bigger, writing in 1900, noted that the slab stood between two of the island's churches, known as Templedermot and Templemore, which gives some sense of how densely settled with religious structures Inchcleraun once was. The carving on the front face is the more elaborate of the two: a Latin cross, the familiar tall-shafted form, is rendered in a single incised line and set inside a second cross of the same type, with stepped angles where the arms meet and rectangular terminals at each end. A border runs along the shaft, and just beneath the crosshead it appears to curve into something resembling the volute at the top of a crosier, the hooked staff carried by abbots and bishops as a symbol of pastoral authority. Two small circles are carved in the spaces between the arms. The reverse face is quieter, a simpler Latin cross with rounded junctions, though scholars have noted the faint possibility that it was originally intended as a ringed cross, the ring connecting the arms being a form common in early Irish stonework, with the spaces between the arms perhaps shaped as thistle or bell forms.

Cross-slabs of this kind are among the most widespread monuments of early Irish Christianity, used to mark graves or sacred boundaries, and the variety of designs on a single island reflects the long use of Inchcleraun as a monastic site. That this one is now stored in a County Galway depot rather than on the Longford island where it originated is, in its own way, part of its history too.