Cross - Churchyard cross, Saunderscourt, Co. Wexford

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross – Churchyard cross, Saunderscourt, Co. Wexford

At the north-western corner of the graveyard at Saunderscourt in County Wexford, a fragment of stonework sits balanced on top of the boundary wall, occupying a position that is neither quite inside the burial ground nor fully outside it.

It is the remains of an old churchyard cross, now reduced to its base and a portion of its shaft, and its placement on the wall gives it a slightly makeshift quality, as though it ended up there by practical necessity rather than ceremony.

What survives is modest but quietly interesting. The base measures roughly 34 centimetres square and stands 37 centimetres high, while the surviving section of shaft rises a further 87 centimetres above it. Most churchyard crosses were carved from a single tapering block of stone, so the cross-section of the shaft, noted as possibly hexagonal or octagonal, is an unusual detail. The majority of such crosses are square or cylindrical in profile; a multi-sided shaft, if that is indeed what this was, would have required more deliberate shaping and suggests a degree of craft in the original commission. Whether the cross was broken at some earlier point and repositioned on the wall for safekeeping, or simply set there during a later reorganisation of the graveyard, is not recorded.

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