Cross - Market cross, Kells, Co. Kilkenny

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross – Market cross, Kells, Co. Kilkenny

What remains of the market cross at Kells in County Kilkenny is, by any measure, incomplete.

The cross itself has long since vanished, its disappearance unrecorded, leaving behind only its base and pedestal. What visitors encounter today is a large circular stone, roughly 1.5 metres in diameter and about 22 centimetres high, possibly a reused millstone, with a shaped limestone pedestal fitted into its centre. The top of that pedestal retains a socket, cut specifically to receive the shaft of a cross that has not stood there for an unknown number of centuries.

The writer William Carrigan, writing in 1905, traced the cross's wandering history with some precision. It had originally stood on the roadside opposite the entrance to what was known locally as Bosheen na gcorp, a boreen (a narrow country lane) that once led down to the Augustinian priory and its graveyard. At some point it was shifted to the south corner of a nearby field, and later moved again, ending up only a few yards from where it is believed to have first been erected. Faint traces of arcading on the upper portion of the limestone pedestal, noted by archaeologist Heather King in 1993, point to a possible 13th-century date for the stonework, a period when such decorative blind arcading, small ornamental arched panels carved in relief, was common in medieval Irish ecclesiastical carving. The cross that once occupied the socket above all of this is simply gone, the time and manner of its disappearance entirely unknown.

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