Cross, Glebe, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Glebe, Co. Wexford

In a graveyard just south of a church tower in Glebe, County Wexford, two small crosses cut from green stone sit quietly among the other markers, easy to walk past without a second glance.

Their scale alone makes them unusual: one stands no taller than 17 centimetres at its highest point, roughly the height of a paperback book. What it lacks in stature it makes up for in ambiguity. The stem is rectangular in cross-section, and where it meets the head it broadens into what may once have been a disc shape, a form associated with early medieval Irish stone carving in which the arms of a cross are enclosed within a circle. Only a fragment of that possible disc survives, spanning about 25 centimetres, leaving the original form open to interpretation.

Disc-headed crosses, when intact, belong to a tradition stretching back to the early Christian period in Ireland, and even fragmentary examples carry that association. The green stone from which these two crosses are made is itself a quiet detail worth noting: the colour suggests a local stone with a particular mineral composition, distinct from the grey limestone or sandstone more commonly seen in churchyard monuments across the south-east. Beyond that, the record of these objects is sparse. No date of carving, no patron, no direct ecclesiastical connection is documented. They are simply there, small and worn, in a corner of a Wexford graveyard.

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Pete F
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