Cross, Killucan, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Killucan, Co. Westmeath

On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the word "Cross" appears in gothic script near the village of Killucan in County Westmeath, marking a spot where nothing of the sort now stands.

The cross in question has been moved, relocated to a small gathering of wayside crosses on the road between Killucan and Rathwire. Wayside crosses are a familiar feature of the Irish rural landscape, modest stone markers traditionally erected at roadsides for prayer, to mark boundaries, or to commemorate the dead. What makes this particular example quietly puzzling is the degree to which it has been altered, displaced, and gradually silenced.

When surveyors examined the cross in 1976, they recorded an inscription attributing it to a "Darcy" and dating it to 1604, along with a Latin text, though the shaft was already dislodged and broken by that point, with only a squared base remaining intact. By 1998, when the cross was examined again, the picture had changed considerably. It then consisted of two stones inserted into a boulder that may or may not be its original base. The lower stone, grooved vertically along its edges, had a second square-sectioned stone cement-bonded on top of it. More curious still, the upper surface of that stone carried a coating of copper with a fragment of slate embedded in it, and a small iron pin projecting upward. Of the Latin inscription noted twenty-two years earlier, no trace could be deciphered. Whether the inscription was lost to weathering, to the move itself, or to some intervening handling is not recorded. The cross now sits in a group with two others between the two villages, only one of which remains in its original pre-1976 position.

The site as it now exists rewards a careful look rather than a quick glance. The copper coating and iron pin on the upper stone are unusual details, not typical of a standard wayside cross, and their purpose or origin is unexplained in any surviving account. The grooved edges of the lower stone, the mismatched materials, and the uncertainty over whether the boulder beneath it was ever the cross's true base all suggest an object that has accumulated a complicated history, much of it now unreadable.

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