Cross-slab, High Island, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Crosses & Monuments
In the graveyard of High Island, off the Connemara coast, a carved early Christian cross-slab lies face-down in the earth, its decoration completely invisible.
The stone has been repurposed as a sidestone dividing two graves, Graves 5 and 6, and the carved face is pressed against the soil on the north-facing side, where it was only discovered during excavation. It is a quietly strange situation: a deliberately crafted piece of early medieval stonework, now functioning as structural fill, its imagery sealed away from any viewer.
The slab is made from mica-schist, a locally available metamorphic rock, and measures roughly 54 centimetres high, 76 centimetres wide, and 9 centimetres thick, making it a substantial but incomplete fragment. The carving itself is precise in concept: a linear Latin cross, that is, one with a longer lower arm, set within a linear circle, with the arms of the cross projecting beyond the boundary of the circle and terminating in curving forked ends. Cross-slabs of this type, incised rather than relief-carved, are associated with early Irish monastic sites, and High Island, known in Irish as Ard Oileán, was home to a monastery of considerable antiquity. What makes this particular stone more complex is a secondary feature recorded by Fisher in 2014: a double-forked terminal superimposed on the upper arm, suggesting the design was added to or modified at some point after the original carving was completed. White Marshall and Rourke had previously catalogued it in 2000. The sequence of reuse, first as a grave marker or memorial slab, then as anonymous structural material within the very graveyard it once distinguished, compresses several layers of the site's history into a single buried object.