Cross, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

In the south-western corner of the Saints' graveyard on Inis Cealtra, a small island in Lough Derg on the Clare shore, a broken stone base once held a cross above a collective grave.

The inscription carved along its longest side reads, in Old Irish, as the tomb of ten persons. Who those ten were, nobody knows.

The cross-base itself is trapezoidal in plan, measuring roughly 81 centimetres by 1.27 metres, and has been split clean through its socket into two pieces. Only the uppermost few centimetres of the stone were shaped before it was set in place, which scholars Okasha and Forsyth noted in 2001 suggests it was always meant to be sunk into the ground rather than displayed as a finished surface. The upper face carries a dressed groove forming a moulding around its edge, and one corner has been chamfered. The worn inscription, a single horizontal line in Irish along the western face, begins with a cross and translates as the tomb of the ten persons. The base sits just north-east of centre within an almost square enclosure, roughly 2.4 metres by 2.3 metres, marked out by a low kerb of thin upright stones. When the antiquarian R. A. S. Macalister examined the site in 1916 and 1917, he described what appeared to be a low cairn beneath the enclosure, grass-grown and covered with earth. The scattered packing stones and protruding fragments visible today may be what remains of it. The identity of the ten individuals commemorated has not been established, and the inscription offers no further clues beyond the collective count itself.

Iniscealtra, sometimes called Holy Island, is accessible by boat from Mountshannon and the site is a national monument in state care. The Saints' graveyard contains a number of early medieval features, and the cross-base sits quietly among them, easy to overlook without knowing to crouch down and look for the worn lettering along its western edge.

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