Cross-slab, Drumacoo, Co. Galway

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Drumacoo, Co. Galway

In the graveyard at Drumacoo, Co. Galway, a small limestone slab sits among the remains of an early monastic complex, easy to overlook and yet carefully made.

It measures just 55 centimetres tall and 37 centimetres wide, roughly the size of a large book, but its surface carries a grooved Latin cross whose arms and head terminate in distinctive T-shaped finals, a design detail that transforms a plain marker into something deliberate and considered.

The slab was recovered from the graveyard surrounding the church at Drumacoo, itself part of a wider monastic site. Cross-slabs of this kind, flat stones incised with a cross rather than carved in relief, are among the earliest forms of Christian memorial in Ireland, often associated with the grave markers of monks or with boundary and devotional functions within an enclosure. The T-shaped terminals on this example give it a particular character; rather than simply ending, each arm of the cross is finished with a horizontal bar, a motif recorded elsewhere in early medieval Irish stone carving. Scholars John Waddell and J. G. Higgins both noted the slab in their respective surveys, placing it within the broader tradition of early Christian stonework in the west of Ireland.

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