Cross, Eochaill, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Crosses & Monuments
A stone pillar standing nearly two and a half metres tall has been absorbed into a field boundary on Inis Mór, the largest of the Aran Islands, so quietly that it could pass at a glance for a routine piece of drystone walling.
It is not. The pillar, which stands roughly fourteen metres to the west of the early church known as Teampall Chiaráin, carries on its eastern face two carefully incised crosses arranged one above the other, along with a further decorative feature between them whose precise significance remains open to interpretation.
The carving is precise and considered. The upper cross is rendered in a single incised line, with semicircular terminals at each arm and a small circular roundel at its centre, a style associated with early medieval Christian stonework in Ireland. The lower cross is drawn with two parallel lines rather than one, giving it a slightly heavier presence, though its terminals at top and base mirror those of the upper cross closely, and it too has a central roundel. Between the two crosses there is a third element, harder to categorise: two parallel lines running vertically, with paired leaf-shaped projections extending from both ends. It does not read straightforwardly as a cross, and scholars have noted it without settling on a definitive explanation. Wakeman recorded the pillar as early as 1891, and it appears again in studies by Crawford in 1913, O'Flanagan in 1927, and Higgins in 1987, suggesting it has attracted sustained if specialist attention over more than a century.
The pillar's rounded top and its incorporation into a field wall raise questions that are now difficult to answer with certainty. Whether it was always in or near its current position, or whether it was moved and reused as a convenient boundary marker at some point, is unclear. What is apparent is that it sits in close proximity to an early ecclesiastical site, and that whoever incised those crosses did so with care and deliberate intent.