Cross-slab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Crosses & Monuments
On a small island in Lough Derg, in a graveyard reserved for saints, a stone slab lies flat on the ground bearing a carved cross that has gone largely unnoticed for centuries.
The slab is part of the early Christian monastic complex on Inis Cealtra, a place whose layered religious history stretches back well into the early medieval period, and it sits in the western half of what is known locally as the Saint's Graveyard, its position recorded with some precision: 13.3 metres from the southern wall and 3.2 metres from the western.
The stone itself is substantial. It measures just over 1.93 metres in length and tapers from around 0.81 metres at its widest to 0.6 metres at the narrower end, and its carved decoration places it in a recognisable tradition of Irish cross-slab design. A recumbent cross-slab is simply a decorated stone laid horizontally, often used to mark a grave, and this example was recorded by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1916 to 1917 as being of twelfth-century type. The carving consists of a Latin cross formed by two incised lines, with hollowed angles at the intersections, all enclosed within a surrounding frame. The top of the cross is pointed rather than blunt, and outside the enclosing frame at the base there is a splayed extension, a detail that gives the design an architectural quality, almost as if the cross has been set into a kind of doorway within the stone itself.
Inishcaltra is accessible by boat from the Clare shore, and visiting means arriving into a site where the physical remains of an entire monastic community are compressed into a small island, churches, grave markers, and enclosing walls all within close proximity. The Saint's Graveyard, where this slab lies, is a distinct enclosure within that broader complex, and the stone is unobtrusive enough that it can be easy to pass without registering the careful workmanship held in its surface.
