Cross-slab, High Island, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Crosses & Monuments
What visitors to High Island actually encounter in the graveyard's south-east corner is a replica.
The original cross-slab that once stood there as a footstone has been removed to an OPW depot in Athenry, leaving a copy in its place, which makes the object something of a ghost presence: documented, studied, and carefully preserved, but experienced on site at one remove. The slab is one of three decorated examples associated with what scholars call a pseudo grave, Grave 2, a burial feature whose precise nature sets it apart from the ordinary grave plots around it.
The slab itself is made from garnet mica-schist, a metamorphic rock with a faintly glittering surface, and its relatively modest dimensions, 76 centimetres tall and 39 centimetres wide, belie the density of ornament worked into both faces. A small tenon at the base would have anchored it upright in the ground. On the east face, a Latin cross is rendered in low relief, its upper and side limbs ending in large forks, with the shaft rising from a horizontal bar whose ends terminate in small crosslets. The west face carries an incised Greek cross, also with forked terminals, accompanied by four bosses with hollowed centres placed between the arms, and further damaged bosses at the upper corners of the slab. Below the cross on this face, a T-shaped outline has been tentatively interpreted as an incomplete or attempted triquetra, a three-cornered interlace motif common in early medieval Irish and Insular art. The combination of relief carving on one face and incised work on the other, along with the layering of cross types and decorative detail, suggests a carver working within a sophisticated visual programme rather than producing a simple grave marker.