Architectural fragment, Inchcleraun, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Ritual/Ceremonial
On Lough Ree, the island of Inchcleraun holds the remains of several early medieval churches, but much of what was once carved into their stonework no longer sits on the island at all.
More than forty dressed and decorated stones, lifted from the site, are now kept in the locked sacristy of Templemore Augustinian Priory, with a further five held at a depot in Athenry, Co. Galway, and one sandstone slab, possibly from a tomb, in the National Museum of Ireland. The buildings those stones once formed are gone or ruined; what survives is a dispersed jigsaw of architectural detail, catalogued individually and stored in pieces across the country.
The fragments themselves tell a fairly precise story about the ambition of the medieval stonework on the island. Among the recorded pieces are voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that form the curve of an arch, several of them carved with chevron ornament, a zigzag decorative motif strongly associated with Romanesque architecture of the twelfth century. One sandstone voussoir carries two bands of lateral centrifugal chevrons across both its face and soffit, the underside of the arch curve, while others have angle rolls flanked by beading, a common refinement in Irish Romanesque doorways and chancel arches. There are also jamb stones, the uprights that frame doorways or windows, cut with ogee curves, chamfered edges, and roll mouldings; window sills shaped to receive chamfered mullions, some retaining a central rebate for a glazing bar; a limestone keystone from a pointed arch; a fragment of cusped tracery with glazing grooves; and a small broken column or shaft with traces of red pigment still visible on the stone. Perhaps the most striking individual piece is a sandstone capital, the decorative block that sits at the top of a column, where the transition between the circular shaft below and the square section above is marked by two confronted quadrupeds, their snouts meeting at the angle. That kind of figurative carving, miniature and tucked into a structural junction, is characteristic of the inventive detail that medieval Irish masons occasionally worked into otherwise formal architectural schemes.