Cross-slab, Clonaltra, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Clonaltra, Co. Westmeath

A small group of trees in Clonaltra West, Co. Westmeath conceals what may be the remains of an Early Christian cross-slab, a type of carved stone marker common in Ireland from roughly the sixth to the twelfth centuries, typically incised or relief-carved with crosses or geometric motifs and used to mark places of Christian significance.

What survives here is modest almost to the point of invisibility: a fragment measuring just 0.2 metres by 0.16 metres, and only 0.05 metres thick. On its surface, the carving consists of the curving arc of a double-outlined circle, with a further curving line running inside it. It is a remnant, clearly, of something larger and once more legible.

The fragment does not stand alone. Alongside it, within the same cluster of trees, sits a bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more rounded depressions ground into its surface, associated across Ireland with early ecclesiastical sites and, in folk tradition, often believed to have curative or ritual properties. There is also a fragment of a second cross-slab nearby. All of this lies in the northern quadrant of a wider ecclesiastical enclosure, the curving boundary that would originally have defined the sacred precinct of an early Christian foundation. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the enclosure interior as a graveyard, and local tradition adds a further layer: the site is said to have served as a children's burial ground, known in Irish as a cillín, an informal burial place used for unbaptised infants who were excluded by Church practice from consecrated ground. Some 290 metres to the west, there is a holy well, another feature characteristic of these layered, quietly persistent sacred landscapes.

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Pete F
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