Cross-inscribed stone, Bunmore, Co. Mayo

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed stone, Bunmore, Co. Mayo

In Bunmore, County Mayo, there is a graveyard that no longer appears to exist, and within it, a gravestone that cannot be found.

That particular quality of double absence, a lost object in a lost place, gives this small Co. Mayo site an odd and melancholy character that far grander monuments rarely achieve.

In the early 1940s, an Irish Tourism Survey recorded the presence of an old graveyard containing a rough gravestone bearing a small, crudely inscribed Latin cross. The Latin cross, with its longer lower arm, is one of the most common forms found on early Irish grave markers, often cut with minimal tools and no great pretension to artistry. The description "very rough" and "roughly inscribed" suggests this was not a commissioned piece of stonework but something fashioned locally, possibly at some remove from any professional carving tradition. When an inspection was carried out in 1996, neither the stone nor any recognisable trace of the graveyard could be located. Whether the site was absorbed into surrounding land, obscured by vegetation, or simply eroded away over the intervening decades is not recorded.

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Pete F
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