Cross, Kill Of The Grange, Co. Dublin

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Kill Of The Grange, Co. Dublin

The stone crosses that once marked the ecclesiastical site at Kill of the Grange are no longer there.

What visitors find instead are absences, a cross base without its cross, a graveyard on a low rise in south County Dublin where two medieval stones once stood, and the knowledge that the crosses themselves now sit in a depot in Trim, County Meath, roughly fifty kilometres away. It is a quietly odd situation, the kind that rewards a little digging.

The site at Kill of the Grange is a layered early Christian and medieval complex, comprising a pre-Norman church with a late medieval chancel, a graveyard, a holy well, a bullaun stone (a large boulder with one or more cup-shaped depressions, often associated with early monastic sites), two graveslabs, a stone font, and the remains of a cross base. Two stone crosses once completed this grouping. The 1863 edition of the Ordnance Survey Ireland 25-inch map records both, annotated in Gothic script as 'Stone Cross', a cartographic convention that signals recognised antiquity. The first cross, a broken ringed high cross, stood approximately five metres north of the centre of the medieval church, just north of an east-west pathway through the graveyard. The second, described as having the appearance of a Tau cross, the T-shaped form associated with early Christian symbolism, stood roughly 100 metres to the south-southwest of the church, on the north side of the former entrance laneway. Around 1970, the Office of Public Works moved the smaller cross head into the nave of the church. Both crosses were later transferred to the OPW depot at Trim, where they remain. Photographs taken by Paddy Healy, now held in the South Dublin Libraries Local Studies Collection, document the ringed cross both in situ in the graveyard and at Trim, where Healy photographed it on 27 November 1979.

The site sits on a low rise in a green area northeast of the Kill Abbey road. The cross base associated with the second cross remains in place, and the broader complex, graveyard, church ruins, bullaun stone, and holy well, is still accessible. Those who know what to look for will find the base sitting without its head, a fairly succinct illustration of how medieval stonework has been moved, stored, and separated from its original context over the past century. The photographs in the South Dublin Libraries collection are worth consulting before a visit, if only to understand what once stood here and how the site looked before the crosses were relocated.

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