Cross-slab, Ballynakill, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ballynakill, Co. Longford

At a site in Ballynakill, County Longford, five early medieval cross-slabs have been gathered together and mounted on a purpose-built display feature constructed along the line of an old church's eastern gable wall.

One of the five stands slightly apart from its neighbours in character: where the others carry their own decorative treatments, this particular slab bears a simple, incised cross rendered in double lines, a quietly austere design that sets it apart from the rest of the group.

The slab itself measures just under a metre in height and roughly 65 centimetres across, cut to a modest 10 centimetres in thickness. Cross-slabs of this type are early medieval in origin, typically raised as grave markers or devotional stones associated with monastic or ecclesiastical enclosures, and the inscription carved into this one gives it a personal dimension that the bare stonework alone could not. It reads OR DO CHORMACAN, an Old Irish phrase meaning "a prayer for Chormacan", a conventional formula of the period asking for intercession on behalf of a named individual. The reading was recorded by R.A.S. Macalister in his 1949 corpus of Irish inscriptions. Who Chormacan was, whether a local cleric, a patron, or an ordinary member of a monastic community, the stone does not say.

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