Cross-slab, Eochaill, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Eochaill, Co. Galway

In a field to the east of a ruined church known as Teampall Asurnaí in Eochaill, Co. Galway, three early medieval cross-slabs lie recumbent in the grass.

One of them is a piece of particular quiet interest: a tapering limestone slab, roughly one and a half metres long and narrowing from head to foot, bearing a deeply incised Latin cross whose details suggest a craftsman working with considerable intention. The upper arm of the cross ends in a rectangular terminal, while the side arms bifurcate, splitting outward around a flat roundel, a design choice that gives the carving an almost architectural quality. A natural groove runs into the top right-hand corner of the stone, an accident of geology that the mason apparently accepted and worked around.

Cross-slabs of this kind, flat grave markers incised with a cross rather than raised in the manner of a high cross, are associated with early Christian monastic and ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, and their carving styles help scholars place them within broad chronological ranges. This particular example was catalogued and discussed by Higgins in 1987, where it appeared as no. 36 in the second volume of what was evidently a systematic survey of such monuments. The church beside which it rests, Teampall Asurnaí, lends the site its broader context, suggesting a place of religious significance that attracted burial and commemoration over a long period. The slab is one of three in the same field, each presumably marking a grave, though the individuals commemorated are now entirely unknown.

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