Cross, Killegar, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Killegar, Co. Wicklow

Against the southern wall of a chancel in Killegar, County Wicklow, a small congregation of carved stones has accumulated over the centuries, each one a slightly different attempt to express the same basic impulse: marking something sacred in stone.

What makes the collection quietly remarkable is its variety. One slab, standing just over a metre tall, carries cup and ring marks, those concentric circular carvings more commonly associated with prehistoric rock art, alongside other ornamentation. Another, slightly shorter, shows a Latin cross rendered in shallow relief, with circles punctuating the top and arm ends and semicircular curves filling the space beneath the arms. A third, much smaller at under half a metre, bears nothing more than a simple incised cross, as though the carver wanted to make the point without elaboration.

Among the pieces is the head of a Tau cross, a T-shaped form in which the crossbar sits at the very top rather than partway down the shaft, named for its resemblance to the Greek letter tau. This fragment, just 24 centimetres tall and nearly half a metre across its arms, has a raised central boss on both faces, a detail noted by the scholar Peter Harbison in 1992. Nearby sit fragments of two rotary querns, the paired grinding stones used to mill grain, which have no obvious devotional function and whose presence here adds a slightly domestic note to an otherwise ceremonial gathering. Outside the chancel's south wall, a granite cross-base survives, though whatever shaft and head it once supported are long gone. The head of a further stone cross, which formerly stood to the south-west of the church, was recorded by Ó Ríordáin in 1947 and has since been removed to the National Museum of Ireland. A 1992 photograph published by Healy shows yet another piece: an upright slab with a circular depression at its centre, ringed by a raised band, with an equal-armed cross above it, a form that sits somewhere between abstract and devotional.

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