Cross-slab, High Island, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Crosses & Monuments
A small slab of mica-schist, barely thirty centimetres square, turned up during the digging of a trench on High Island off the Connemara coast, and what it reveals in that compact space is quietly remarkable.
Only the cross-head survives, broken from whatever shaft once extended below it, yet the decoration on its single carved face is precisely worked: a band-cross in low relief, its arms ending in forked terminals, with a central roundel enclosing a Greek cross. Four bosses occupy the four quadrants of the cross-head, one in each corner. It is the kind of object that rewards close attention, where the geometry tightens the more carefully you look.
High Island, known in Irish as Ard Oileán, was the site of an early medieval monastery, and the cross-slab belongs to that devotional landscape. The fragment came to light to the west of the island's holy well, a proximity that is unlikely to be coincidental. Holy wells in early Christian Ireland were frequently focal points for prayer and penitential practice, and carved stones were often placed nearby as markers or objects of veneration. The slab is made of mica-schist, a metamorphic rock with a distinctive layered, slightly glittering surface, well suited to the kind of shallow relief carving visible here. The cruciform format, with its band-cross design and boss ornament, is consistent with early medieval Irish stoneworking traditions, though the fragment is too incomplete to date with precision. It was recorded by Fisher in 2014 and had earlier been noted by White Marshall and Rourke in 2000. The cross-slab is no longer on the island itself; it is now held at the Office of Public Works depot in Athenry, Co. Galway, removed for safekeeping after its discovery.