Cross-slab, Clonmacnoise, Co. Offaly
Co. Offaly |
Crosses & Monuments
Among the hundreds of early medieval grave-slabs that have been recovered at Clonmacnoise, the great monastic site on the River Shannon in County Offaly, most carry an inscription asking a prayer for the soul of the person buried beneath.
This one does not. It is a fragment, preserving only the centre and one corner of its border, and whatever name it may once have carried is gone. What remains is enough, however, to show that it was a carefully composed piece of work: a double outline ring cross with hollow angles, the whole thing framed by two lines that are themselves formed from the extensions of the cross arms, and at the centre, a lozenge shape enclosing a small roundel. It is a design that folds in on itself with a kind of geometric logic, each element growing out of the one before it.
The ring cross, in which a circle connects the arms of the cross, is one of the defining forms of early Irish Christian art, appearing in stone, metalwork, and manuscript illumination from roughly the seventh century onwards. The Clonmacnoise slabs as a group represent one of the largest collections of such grave markers in Ireland, produced over several centuries by a monastic community that was at various points one of the most significant centres of learning and craftsmanship in the country. This particular fragment was documented by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister, who worked at the site between 1898 and 1905, during a period when serious academic attention was first being paid to the sheer scale and variety of the Clonmacnoise collection. The slab measures roughly forty centimetres high by thirty-five wide, and is only three centimetres thick, suggesting it was always a relatively slender piece, likely set flat or near-flat over a grave rather than raised upright.