Cross, Kilcavan, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Kilcavan, Co. Wicklow

In the field boundaries of County Wicklow, a small early Christian cross has been quietly pressed into service as an ordinary building stone.

The cross, a crude Latin form cut from a single piece of stone, measures roughly 45 centimetres tall and 40 centimetres wide, and sits just 30 centimetres above ground level, incorporated into the north face of a field boundary wall immediately south of a ruined church site. It is not displayed or protected; it is simply there, doing the structural work of any other piece of stone in the wall.

The site sits on a gently west-facing slope overlooking a stream in Kilcavan, and by 1838, when the first Ordnance Survey six-inch maps were made, the church that once stood here was already a memory. The mapmakers labelled it plainly: Site of Kilcavan Church. The church remains and its surrounding enclosure, the kind of earthen or stone boundary that typically defined an early ecclesiastical settlement in Ireland, were already ruins. At some point, possibly centuries before the OS surveyors arrived, the cross was taken from its original context and built into the field boundary wall, which stands about a metre high and is constructed of earth faced with stone, with a drainage ditch running along its northern side. The re-use of carved stone in later field walls and buildings is not uncommon in Ireland, where cut stone was a practical resource, but it still carries a particular strangeness to find a devotional object absorbed so thoroughly into the agricultural landscape.

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Pete F
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