Cross - High cross, Ballyogan, Co. Kilkenny

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross – High cross, Ballyogan, Co. Kilkenny

In a field beside a quiet by-road in south County Kilkenny, there is nothing left to see.

No masonry, no earthwork, no marker. The site known locally as Páirc an Teampaill, the Chapel Field, does not appear on any Ordnance Survey map, and the church that once stood there has vanished entirely below ground level. What survives of this place's significance is now somewhere else entirely, standing in a graveyard roughly two kilometres to the west.

Killanin and Duignan, writing in 1967, describe the Chapel Field as the site of successive religious foundations: first an early monastery, and then a manorial church, a private place of worship attached to a medieval lord's estate. The site lies about 880 metres south-southwest of Galmoy Castle and some 330 metres west of the River Barrow, on the east side of a minor road running between the R705 and the river. At some point, the high cross that once belonged to the monastery was removed from this field and re-erected in the graveyard adjoining the restored Cistercian abbey church at Graiguenamanagh. A high cross is typically a large, free-standing carved stone cross, often elaborately decorated, associated with early Irish monastic sites. The one from Ballyogan now stands among the abbey's other stonework, displaced from the landscape that gave it its original meaning.

For anyone curious enough to look, the cross can be seen in Graiguenamanagh, in the graveyard beside the Cistercian abbey there. The field in Ballyogan where it once stood, and where the monastery and manorial church before it once functioned, offers nothing visible to the eye. That absence is, in its own way, the point.

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