Cross, Lisnamaneeagh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Crosses & Monuments
In the townland of Lisnamaneeagh in County Mayo, there was once a cross.
That much is certain. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838 marks it plainly, named simply "Cross", positioned to the south of a holy well. By the time the next significant edition of the map appeared in 1919, the designation had quietly shifted to "Cross (Site of)", that small parenthetical marking the moment something passed from presence into memory. Today there is no trace of it at all, and no record survives of what form it ever took.
The association with a holy well is significant. In Ireland, crosses and holy wells were frequently paired, the cross serving as a focus for devotion, a waymarker for pilgrims, or a boundary to the sacred ground of the well itself. They might be carved stone slabs, simple upright pillars, or more elaborate decorated monuments. In this case, the form remains entirely unknown. The eighty or so years between the 1838 and 1919 maps were enough for whatever stood here to disappear so completely that even its character went unrecorded. Whether it fell, was removed, or simply crumbled into the ground, nobody thought to write it down.