Cross, Drumacoo, Co. Galway

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Drumacoo, Co. Galway

A stone cross that has been broken into pieces for centuries still manages to hold its ground, quite literally, on a gentle north-western slope in County Galway.

One fragment of its octagonal shaft remains slotted into the original base, just as it was set; the other piece lies on the ground a short distance to the north-east, as though it simply toppled and no one ever came to lift it. Together, the surviving sections suggest the complete cross stood at least one and a half metres tall, which would have made it a conspicuous presence in the early medieval landscape.

The cross sits on what may be a prehistoric cairn, a mounded burial feature, roughly 165 metres to the south-east of the monastic complex at Drumacoo, a site associated with early Christian activity on the south shore of Galway Bay. The base itself is composed of two horizontal stone slabs placed one on top of the other, the upper slab neatly chamfered at its edges, and the whole base is positioned in the western corner of a near-square arrangement of large stone blocks. This arrangement is thought to be a leacht, a low commemorative or devotional monument found at early Irish religious sites, often used as a focus for prayer or remembrance. The cross shaft is octagonal in cross-section, a form associated with early medieval Irish stonework, and the precision of its fitting into the base implies skilled craft even if the original carver's name is long lost. Lord Killanin noted the site in 1951, placing it within a broader catalogue of Galway's ecclesiastical monuments.

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