Cross-slab, Killegar, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Killegar, Co. Wicklow

Against the southern wall of a chancel in Killegar, County Wicklow, a small and somewhat miscellaneous gathering of early medieval stonework has quietly accumulated over the centuries.

What makes the collection unusual is not any single object but the variety: several carved cross-slabs of different sizes and styles, a fragment of a Tau cross, a granite cross-base, and even parts of two rotary querns, the paired circular grinding stones once used for milling grain. It is an oddly domestic note to strike among devotional carving, and it hints at the layered, practical life of an early ecclesiastical site.

The slabs themselves range considerably in scale and ambition. The largest, standing 1.14 metres tall, carries cup and ring marks alongside other ornamentation; cup and ring marks are circular hollows pecked into stone, often surrounded by concentric rings, whose precise meaning remains debated but whose origins are prehistoric. A second slab, at 0.95 metres, displays a Latin cross in shallow relief, with circles at the top and arm ends and semicircular curves filling the space beneath the arms, a composition that suggests a craftsman working carefully within a familiar decorative grammar. A third, much smaller at just 0.49 metres, bears only a simple incised Latin cross. The Tau cross fragment, named for its resemblance to the Greek letter and sometimes associated with early monastic culture, measures 0.24 metres in height with a spread of 0.49 metres across its arms, and carries a central boss on both faces, as noted by the scholar Peter Harbison in 1992. A photograph taken that same year recorded yet another erect slab with a circular depression at its centre, enclosed by a raised band, with an equal-armed cross above it.

Not everything has remained in place. The head of a stone cross that once stood to the south-west of the church was documented by Ó Ríordáin in 1947 and has since been removed to the National Museum of Ireland, leaving only a small granite cross-base, measuring roughly 0.27 by 0.17 metres, outside the chancel's southern wall. The departure of that piece makes what remains at Killegar feel all the more contingent, a surviving cluster rather than a complete ensemble.

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