Cross, Inchcleraun, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Inchcleraun, Co. Longford

On the island of Inchcleraun in Lough Ree, a roughly dressed block of stone lies on the ground, unfinished and apparently abandoned mid-task.

It is pyramidal in shape, intended as the base for a cross that was never completed, and it sits on the south-south-eastern edge of a monastic cashel, a stone-walled enclosure that once defined the boundaries of an early Irish religious community. Around it, other worked stones of uncertain age are scattered nearby, suggesting this corner of the island has long been a place where things were made, moved, and sometimes simply left.

What makes the spot quietly compelling is the company the cross base keeps. Directly beside it are Romanesque decorated jamb-stones, carved architectural elements from a tradition of ornamentation that flourished in Ireland during the twelfth century, and a bullaun stone, a rounded boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface, likely used for ritual or practical purposes within the monastic community. The ground beneath may be a cobbled pathway, one that appears to have connected the main monastic enclosure to a possible church located approximately fifty-five metres to the west-south-west. Whether the cross base was meant to mark that route, to anchor a standing cross at the cashel boundary, or to serve some other purpose within the monastery's life, is not recorded. It was never finished, and the reason for that interruption has not survived.

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Pete F
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