Cross-slab, Inchagoill, Co. Galway

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Inchagoill, Co. Galway

On the island of Inchagoill in Lough Corrib, a small limestone slab fixed to the southern wall of a ruined church carries a cross that fills almost the entire face of the stone.

The cross itself is crudely pocked rather than cleanly incised, its lines rough and direct, with expanded or wedge-shaped terminals splaying out at each arm. At just under half a metre tall and barely wider than a hand's length, the slab is easy to overlook, yet the simplicity of its carving gives it an odd forcefulness.

The slab sits within the church known as Templenaneeve, one of two early ecclesiastical structures on the island. Writing in 1987, the scholar Higgins catalogued it as a roughly rectangular piece of limestone measuring 0.49 metres in height, 0.22 metres in width, and between 0.09 and 0.1 metres thick. The Latin cross it bears, with its single incised line and flaring terminals, is a type found at early medieval Irish sites, where the act of marking stone with a cross served as both devotional gesture and territorial claim for a monastic community. Fastened now to the wall alongside a cross-inscribed pillar immediately to its west, the slab has been gathered in and secured rather than left to weather in the ground, which is how many comparable pieces have been lost or fragmented over centuries.

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Pete F
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