Cross-slab, Eoghanacht, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Crosses & Monuments
Among the eight carved cross-slabs clustered around Leaba Bhreacáin on the Aran Islands, one in particular rewards close attention.
Set against the northern revetment of the leaba, a roughly subrectangular slab measuring around 1.1 metres by 0.9 metres carries, despite being broken, a surprisingly legible programme of early Christian ornament: a Greek cross with splayed terminals, a central roundel with a cupmark or shallow depression at its heart, and the whole composition enclosed within a two-line circle. What makes it stranger still is the faint inscription visible across three of the surviving cantons, reading SCI BRE NI, an abbreviation of Santi Brecani, meaning Saint Brecan.
Leaba Bhreacáin, the name translating loosely as the bed or grave of Brecan, is a monument associated with one of the early medieval saints venerated on Inis Mór. The cross-slabs gathered around it form a coherent early ecclesiastical group, and this particular example, with its combination of incised cross-form, encircling lines, and fragmentary Latin inscription, belongs to a tradition of Early Christian memorial carving found across the west of Ireland. The Greek cross with splayed, or flared, arm-terminals is a form common in insular stone carving of the early medieval period, and the inscription follows a compact epigraphic convention in which a saint's name is abbreviated across the quadrants of the cross. Scholars including Macalister, Westropp, Crawford, and Higgins have each noted and catalogued this slab, with John Waddell's 1973 study placing it as number four in his sequence and providing the reading of the inscription.