Cross, Moydow Glebe, Co. Longford

The collar is all that remains of a seventeenth-century wayside or memorial cross, reduced to a roughly square block measuring just twenty centimetres high. It is easy to overlook, and easier still to misread, the modern addition obscuring the fact that what matters here is the fragment underneath.

The collar is carefully made. Square in section, each of its four faces is divided into three panels: the upper and lower chamfered at an angle, the central one left flat, a small but deliberate piece of stonework. Around all four faces runs an inscription carved in false relief, meaning the letters are raised rather than cut into the stone, using Roman English capitals. It reads, with some letters now damaged or uncertain: "THIS CR[O]SS WAS BVILT BY MORGAN & ROSE FARRELL PRAY FOR TIRLAG/H" followed by partially legible names, and then "THE 18 OF 7EMBER 1640." The "7EMBER" is a period convention for September, the seventh month in the old Roman calendar count. The Farrells commissioned the cross and asked future readers to pray for the named individuals, a standard formula in Catholic memorial practice of the period. The year 1640 places it on the eve of the 1641 rebellion, a moment of considerable tension in the Irish Midlands, which makes the quiet domesticity of the commission, a husband and wife putting up a cross and asking for prayers, all the more striking.