Cross, Aghowle, Co. Wicklow

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Aghowle, Co. Wicklow

In Aghowle graveyard in County Wicklow, three stone cross-bases sit without their crosses.

The shafts and heads that once rose from them are long gone, leaving only the lower sections embedded in the ground, silent evidence of monuments that no longer exist above the soil line. It is an oddly affecting sight, the absence itself becoming the thing you notice.

Cross-base A, the most closely documented of the three, sits roughly six and a half metres east of the early medieval church at Aghowle. It is partly earthfast, meaning it is set into the ground rather than resting fully on the surface, a common way of anchoring freestanding stone crosses in early Irish ecclesiastical sites. The block itself is sub-rectangular granite, measuring fifty-six centimetres by forty-five centimetres across and at least twenty centimetres thick. Its upper surface is flat and dressed, indicating deliberate shaping by hand. Cut into that surface is a socket, twenty-one centimetres by thirteen centimetres and ten centimetres deep, with straight sides and an irregular base. That socket is where the tenon of a stone cross shaft would once have been fitted. Chris Corlett's 2019 description captures the block in precise, measured terms, but those measurements also convey something else: this is a relatively modest base, suggesting the cross it held was functional and local rather than monumental in ambition.

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Pete F
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