Cross-slab, Taghshinny, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Crosses & Monuments
In the graveyard at Taghshinny, close to the south-east corner of an eighteenth-century church, a flat stone slab sits quietly aligned north to south, its eastern face carved with a Latin cross whose arms terminate in expanded, D-shaped lobes.
The slab itself is modest in scale, roughly seventy centimetres high and just over seventy wide, and not especially thick. What catches the eye, once you look carefully, is a second, much smaller incised cross enclosed within a circle, positioned precisely at the point where the stem and arm of the larger cross meet. It is an understated detail, the kind of thing easily missed.
Cross-slabs of this type are early medieval in character, typically associated with Irish ecclesiastical sites where they marked graves or served as devotional objects. The decoration here, with its terminal expansions and the nested cross-within-circle motif, follows conventions found across early Christian Ireland, though each example carries its own variation in execution. Taghshinny itself retains two such slabs, this one and a second elsewhere in the same graveyard, suggesting the site had some significance during the early medieval period, long before the present church was built. The church standing nearby dates to the eighteenth century, but the presence of these carved stones points to a much older layer of use at this location.