Cross-slab (present location), Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab (present location), Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

A small stone slab, barely the height of a large hardback book placed on its end, carries an inscription that crosses two languages in a single breath.

One face is filled with carved lettering preceded by a simple incised cross, asking the reader to pray for a man named Muredach Ó Chomocáin and noting, in Latin, that he sleeps here. The switching between Old Irish and Latin within one short dedication makes it a genuinely rare survival; most early medieval inscriptions stay within one linguistic register or the other. The slab itself measures 0.429 metres high, 0.213 metres wide, and just 0.028 metres thick, so it is an intimate object rather than a monumental one, easy to overlook in a large museum collection.

The stone was first recorded in 1893 by the antiquarian W.F. Wakeman, who found it in Teach Molaise, a small oratory on Inishmurray Island off the coast of Co. Sligo. Inishmurray was an early monastic site set on an exposed Atlantic island, and Teach Molaise, meaning the house of Saint Molaise, was one of its principal ecclesiastical enclosures. The slab remained on the island until 1971, when it was removed to the National Museum of Ireland, where it was registered as 1971:1116. The full archaeological context of the inscription, including its original recorded location on the island under a separate monument number, was documented as part of a survey of Inishmurray carried out between 1997 and 1999, with findings published by Jerry O'Sullivan and Tomás Ó Carragáin in their 2008 volume on the island's monks and pilgrims.

The slab is held by the National Museum of Ireland, whose main archaeology collection is housed at Kildare Street in Dublin city centre. It is worth bearing in mind that not every item in a national museum collection is on permanent public display; smaller inscribed stones sometimes rotate in and out of exhibition or are held in study storage. Visitors with a particular interest in the piece would do well to contact the museum in advance to confirm whether it can be viewed. Those who want to understand the slab in its original landscape context might also consider that Inishmurray itself, though now uninhabited, can be reached by boat in calm summer conditions, and the enclosure where it once lay is still visible.

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