Cross, Mountnugent, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Crosses & Monuments
A small sandstone cross in a County Kilkenny graveyard carries an inscription that nobody has quite been able to read.
The letters carved at the top, where INRI would conventionally appear on a crucifixion cross, have worn or been damaged to the point where they read either as "I T" or "S J". That second reading is the more intriguing one: if the letters are indeed S J, they may point to St. John the Baptist, the patron associated with this locality, quietly rewriting the usual iconographic script in a way that would have been deliberate and legible to anyone who worshipped here.
The cross itself is modest in scale, just 0.48 metres high and 0.28 metres wide, now set into a concrete base. It is carved from sandstone and dates from the late medieval period or early seventeenth century. The figure of the crucified Christ is rendered in high relief, arms outstretched, legs side by side rather than crossed, head bare, wearing a loin cloth. What makes it particularly valuable to anyone interested in how such objects were made is a row of dots still faintly visible along the left side of the figure: these were the carver's guide marks, used to lay out the form before cutting began, a rare survival of workshop technique in stone. Hegarty, writing in 1983, noted that the background surface had been worked in shallow grooved strokes of varying length, described as somewhat haphazard in execution but producing a quietly elegant effect. Beneath the figure, partially hidden now by the concrete plinth, is a second inscribed cross with expanded terminals, the arms flaring outward at their ends in a form common to Irish ecclesiastical carving.
The cross sits in a graveyard associated with a church that has vanished entirely from view at ground level. Around 26 metres to the south-west lies a holy well, and the cross may originally have been connected to that site rather than the graveyard, suggesting it has moved at least once in its history, carrying its ambiguous inscription with it.