Cross, Ballyshanny, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Crosses & Monuments
On a low knoll in County Clare pasture, there is a site officially recorded on maps as a cross.
There is no cross. There has not been one for generations, and the only physical trace of whatever once stood here is, at best, ambiguous: a small circular arrangement of grass-covered stones that may or may not have served as a plinth.
The absence has its own history. An observer named Kaftannikov, working in the 1950s, recorded a well-cut stone socket set within a heap of stones on the knoll, which at least confirmed that something had once been mounted there. But even that socket is now gone. The landowner offered an explanation passed down through his family: in his grandfather's time, a group of men came by night, lifted the cross from its socket, and carried it away. No record of who they were, where they went, or what became of the cross appears to have survived. By 1897, the Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan was already labelling the spot "Cross (Site of)", and the 1920 edition of the six-inch map repeated the same cautious designation. The site sits within a much larger multiperiod field system, suggesting the knoll has been a feature of the farmed landscape across several distinct eras.
What remains today is a matter of careful reading of the ground. Roughly 7.5 metres to the north-east of the probable cross location, surveyors identified a very small circular area, just 2.7 metres in diameter, defined by large unworked stone blocks set on edge as a kerb, with the interior filled with loose stones. This could be the plinth on which the cross once stood. There is also the possibility that the heap of stones Kaftannikov described corresponds instead to a penitential station, a place where worshippers would traditionally complete a circuit of prayers on their knees. The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and the site has not resolved the question. It sits in its field, officially noted, physically unremarkable, and missing the thing that gave it its name.