Cross-slab, Carrowntomush, Co. Galway

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Carrowntomush, Co. Galway

In the graveyard at Carrowntomush, a broken sandstone block carries a carved cross that was never meant to be incomplete.

At some point before it was recorded by scholars, the slab was pulled from its original context and pressed into service as a building stone, a fate betrayed by traces of mortar still visible on its surface. It is a small object, just 0.65 metres tall and 0.44 metres wide, but its modest dimensions make the precision of its carving all the more striking once you look closely.

The design, documented by Higgins in 1987, is a ringed two-line Latin cross, a type carved in early medieval Ireland in which the arms of the cross are rendered as double lines and enclosed within a circle or ring. Single lobes sit in each of the angles between the arms, a decorative detail found on a number of Irish cross-slabs from the early Christian period. The surviving terminal at the head of the cross is wedge-shaped, while the arm that remains intact ends in a straight terminal, suggesting the other arms may have varied or that the break has obscured the full pattern. Two slightly arcing lines at the base of the cross may once have completed a semicircle beneath it, though the fracture through the block makes this uncertain. This slab is not alone in the graveyard. Two further cross-slabs, also recorded by Higgins, survive in the same burial ground, all three associated with the remains of the church that once stood here. Together they point to a site with a longer and more layered ecclesiastical history than the ruined stonework alone might suggest.

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