Cross-inscribed stone, Fore, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Crosses & Monuments
In the north-western corner of the graveyard at Fore, a low sandstone slab stands with a crudely cut cross on its eastern face.
It is not a grand monument. The stone measures just 35 centimetres high, 43 centimetres wide, and 9 centimetres thick, an irregular, unpretentious piece of rock that might easily be passed without a second glance. What makes it quietly interesting is precisely that modesty, and the fact that nobody can say with any certainty when it was made or by whom.
The stone sits in the north-western quadrant of the graveyard, about 1.7 metres south of the northern boundary wall and 12 metres east of the western wall, placing it just to the north-north-west of the west gable of St Feichin's Church. That church is itself named for the seventh-century founder of the monastic settlement at Fore, one of the more celebrated early medieval sites in the Irish midlands. Cross-inscribed stones of this kind, simple slabs marked with a incised cross rather than carved into the elaborate high-cross form, are scattered across early Christian sites throughout Ireland. They could serve as grave markers, boundary indicators, or objects of personal devotion, but the date of any individual example is often very difficult to establish. This one at Fore is listed simply as being of uncertain date, which is an honest reflection of the limits of what the stone itself will tell us.
The stone is positioned close enough to St Feichin's Church that a visitor moving through the graveyard would encounter it naturally while exploring that corner of the site. It sits on the ground rather than being set upright in any commanding way, so it rewards the kind of slow, attentive wandering that old graveyards tend to encourage.