Cross, Killinure, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Killinure, Co. Westmeath

On the eastern shore of Rinardoo Bay on Lough Ree, a small limestone cross base sits in ground that floods for part of the year, partially submerged and slowly weathering back into the landscape.

What survives is modest: a square base roughly 0.6 metres across and 0.32 metres high, with a central square socket cut into its top face. Beside it lies a fragment of cross shaft, chamfered on all four sides, almost certainly the lower section of the cross that once stood in that socket. When the site was recorded in 1977, visitors had already begun pressing coins into the hollow, a spontaneous votive habit with roots in very old instincts about water, stone, and sacred ground.

The faint marks in one corner of the base may be a trace of the letters I H S, a Christogram common on ecclesiastical stonework, though the carving is too worn to be certain. The cross almost certainly belonged to an Early Christian monastic complex whose footprint is still readable in the surrounding landscape. About 75 metres to the north, a church and graveyard occupy the same site as the original monastery, and a motte and bailey, the earthwork remains of a Norman fortification, was later raised on the same ground, a pattern of successive occupation that appears repeatedly across Ireland wherever an established religious site offered both prestige and practicality. Fifteen metres to the north-north-west stands a bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more carved depressions used for grinding or, in later centuries, as a focus for local ritual. Portlick Castle lies about 530 metres to the north-west, completing a dense cluster of monuments around this quiet bay.

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Pete F
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