Cross-inscribed stone, Carrignagower, Co. Wicklow

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed stone, Carrignagower, Co. Wicklow

In a field at Carrignagower in County Wicklow, a large granite slab sits almost flush with the ground, propped at its southern corner on two small stones as though someone once needed to slide something underneath and never quite finished the job.

The block measures just over a metre in length and about eighty centimetres across, and on its upper surface someone has cut a ringed cross, the circle surrounding the cross-arms being a form associated with early Christian stone carving in Ireland, with the terminals of the arms slightly expanded, giving each end a subtle flare. It is the kind of object that rewards a second look; easy to walk past, impossible to forget once noticed.

The cross type, a ringed cross with expanded terminals incised directly into the stone surface rather than carved in relief, places this slab within a tradition of early medieval devotional marking, though pinning down an exact date for such carvings is rarely straightforward. What gives the Carrignagower stone an additional layer of interest is the scatter of worked flint found roughly twenty-five metres away in the same field: one flint core and three flint flakes, the debris left behind when prehistoric people were shaping stone tools. Flint does not occur naturally in Wicklow's granite uplands, so its presence suggests that whoever left it had carried the material some distance. The two finds are almost certainly unrelated in time, separated by millennia, yet together they suggest that this patch of ground has drawn human attention across a very long span.

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Carrignagower, Co. Wicklow
53.21149032,-6.45783483

Ref: WI00048

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