Cross, Lockstown, Co. Wicklow

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Lockstown, Co. Wicklow

A rough granite cross sits on a gentle slope at the northern end of a low ridge in Lockstown, County Wicklow, and what makes it quietly arresting is its apparent incompleteness.

Standing just over a metre tall, it appears to have been cut directly from a boulder found in a field boundary rather than fashioned from quarried stone, and the simplicity of its form raises the question of whether the carver simply stopped, or whether this spare, unadorned shape was always the intention.

The cross lies approximately a hundred metres north-west of a children's burial ground, a proximity that is unlikely to be coincidental. Children's burial grounds in Ireland, sometimes called cillíní, were informal sites used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground under Catholic ecclesiastical rules. They are often located at the margins of townlands, near old boundaries or ancient earthworks, and carry a particular social and spiritual weight in the Irish landscape. Whether this cross was raised to mark the path to that ground, to sanctify the approach to it, or to serve some other devotional purpose connected with it is not recorded. The fact that it was cut from a boulder found in a field boundary suggests a practical, local act rather than any formal ecclesiastical commission, which adds to the sense of something made quietly, without ceremony, by someone who needed it to exist.

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