Cross, Clonagh, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Crosses & Monuments
In a field of gently rolling Kildare pastureland, a small grass-covered mound carries the remains of what was once a standing cross. The mound itself is modest, barely thirty centimetres above the surrounding ground and only three and a half metres across, yet it lifts the fragment just enough to suggest that someone, at some point, considered this a place that warranted a degree of ceremony.
What survives is sparse but legible. A roughly dressed limestone block, almost square and with chamfered edges, sits as the base, and from it rises a hexagonal shaft-fragment, less than half a metre tall. The hexagonal profile is an uncommon form for a cross shaft, distinguishing this remnant from the more typical round or square sections found elsewhere in the Irish midlands. Together, base and shaft stand as the surviving portion of a cross that tradition associates with a former burial ground in the vicinity. The precise history of that ground, whether it was a pre-Christian site later absorbed into Christian practice or a more conventional early medieval cemetery, is not recorded, but the pairing of a low circular mound with a memorial cross is a combination that turns up repeatedly at sites where long-term funerary use has left its mark on the landscape.
