Cross (present location), Kill Of The Grange, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Crosses & Monuments
A granite cross base sits inside the roofless nave of a medieval church at Kill of the Grange, south County Dublin, sheltered now by walls rather than the open ground where it spent most of its existence.
It is not where it belongs. The base, cut from granite with a rectangular mortice measuring roughly 31 centimetres long by 25 centimetres wide and 12 centimetres deep, once held a smaller cross in that socket, and the whole arrangement stood about 100 metres to the south-south-west of the church itself, as clearly recorded on the 25-inch Ordnance Survey Ireland map. The cross head that slotted into it is no longer even in the county.
Around 1970, the Office of Public Works removed the cross base from its original position and placed it inside the nave of the church for safe keeping. The head of the cross was taken separately to the OPW depot at Trim, County Meath, where it remains, along with two further crosses that once lined the former laneway leading into the graveyard. A photograph from around 1927, held in the Patrick Healy Collection at South Dublin Libraries, shows the cross head and base still together in their original location, which gives some sense of what has since been dispersed. The Kill of the Grange complex is unusually rich in early medieval stonework: alongside the cross base, the site includes a pre-Norman church with a late medieval chancel, a holy well, a bullaun stone (a large boulder with one or more rounded depressions, associated with early Christian sites and sometimes used for grinding), a cross-inscribed stone, and a stone font.
The graveyard at Kill of the Grange lies to the north-east of Kill Abbey Road, set on a low rise in a green area. The cross base can be seen within the nave of the ruined church on the site. Visitors who know to look for it will find the mortice socket still clearly visible in the granite, an outline of absence where the cross once fitted. A sketch map drawn on 19 October 1970, around the time of the removal, documents the base and the small cross head together, and is worth seeking out alongside the Healy photographs if you want to understand what the arrangement originally looked like before its various components were separated across two counties.
