Architectural fragment, Cloone, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Architectural fragment, Cloone, Co. Leitrim

Set into the southern wall of a graveyard in Cloone, County Leitrim, two carved stone heads stare outward with the slightly unsettling intensity that medieval Irish sculptors seemed to favour.

Each is cut from sandstone and mounted on a corbel, a projecting bracket originally designed to bear weight in a wall or roof structure, and each carries its own character. The western head has bulging eyes, its other features now worn. The eastern is narrower in the face, elongated, with the same prominent eyes looking out from the stonework around it.

The two corbels, along with a fragment of a high cross shaft, were identified by Grant in 1994 and are believed to have originated in the gable of a twelfth-century church, most likely one that once stood on this site, which has its origins as an early medieval monastery. When the graveyard wall was reconstructed, these pieces were incorporated into it rather than discarded or removed, preserving them in place within the landscape they had always occupied. The cross-shaft fragment beside them belongs to the same tradition of finely worked stone that Irish monasteries produced from the early Christian period onward, and its presence alongside the corbels reinforces the sense that this corner of the wall is effectively an unplanned repository of the site's older architectural life.

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