Cross - High cross, Selloo, Co. Monaghan

The piece, a portion of a sandstone shaft measuring just twenty centimetres tall, was pulled from a drain running across a children's burial ground, known in Irish tradition as a cillín, at an early church site in Selloo, County Monaghan, in 1983. High crosses were among the most ambitious artistic undertakings of early Christian Ireland, their surfaces typically carved with interlace, figural scenes, and geometric ornament. This fragment preserves only a portion of that ambition.

One face of the shaft carries a panel of fretwork, the tight angular interlocking pattern common to insular stonework of the early medieval period. The opposite face is a more arresting sight: it was prepared for carving, the stone dressed and ready, but no pattern was ever cut into it. The shorter sides were likewise left plain by intention. Whether the carver never returned to finish the piece, or whether the cross was broken and discarded before the work could proceed, is impossible to say. What remains is essentially a document of a craftsman's process, a before and after preserved in the same small object. Cited in Peter Harbison's corpus of Irish high crosses and in Anna Brindley's earlier survey, the fragment is now held at Monaghan County Museum, where it can be seen properly rather than imagined in a drainage ditch.