Cross - Market cross, Tallaght, Co. Dublin
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Crosses & Monuments
A market cross that ended its days as building material for a bath house is not the most dignified fate for a piece of ecclesiastical stonework, but that, according to local tradition, is precisely what happened to the medieval market cross of Tallaght.
Market crosses were a common feature of Irish and British towns in the medieval period, typically erected at or near the trading area to mark the legitimacy of commerce conducted under the authority of the church or a local lord. This one has left no trace whatsoever above ground.
The story of its disappearance was recorded by John D'Alton in 1838, drawing on a tradition that pointed the finger at Robert Fowler, who served as Archbishop of Dublin. In 1778, according to that account, Fowler had the cross taken down and its stone incorporated into the construction of a bath house. The detail is a small window onto the attitudes of the era, when early medieval and medieval stonework was frequently regarded as a convenient quarry rather than as something worth preserving. By the time William Domville Handcock was writing in 1899, the cross had already passed through a second chapter: fragments described as recovered from the bath house were noted as lying roughly halfway up the Friar's Walk, a local route whose name preserves a faint memory of the Dominican presence in Tallaght. Whether those fragments were subsequently moved again, or simply deteriorated, Handcock does not say, and the record goes quiet after that.
There is nothing to see at the site today; the notes are explicit that no visible surface remains survive. The interest here is less in what can be observed and more in what the paper trail suggests about how communities remembered, and then lost, their own civic and religious landmarks. Anyone with a curiosity about Tallaght's medieval and post-medieval layers might find the Friar's Walk worth seeking out as a named survival in the landscape, even if the stones that once rested along it are long gone.