Cross-slab, Killegar, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Crosses & Monuments
Against the southern wall of the chancel at Killegar, County Wicklow, a small and quietly peculiar assembly of carved stones has accumulated over the centuries.
What makes the collection unusual is not any single piece but the variety compressed into one spot: several cross-slabs of different periods and styles, the head of a Tau cross, fragments of two rotary querns used for grinding grain, and a granite cross-base sitting outside the chancel wall, its original shaft long gone.
The slabs range considerably in ambition and age. The tallest, at 1.14 metres, carries cup and ring marks alongside other ornamental carving; cup and ring marks are circular depressions surrounded by concentric carved rings, a motif with roots in prehistoric stoneworking that was sometimes absorbed into early Christian funerary and devotional contexts. A second slab, 0.95 metres high, shows a Latin cross rendered in shallow relief, with circles at the top and at the ends of the arms, and semicircular curves filling the space beneath them, a more considered composition. A third, much smaller at 0.49 metres, has simply an incised Latin cross, unadorned and direct. The Tau cross head, which takes its name from the Greek letter it resembles, a T-shape rather than the more familiar four-armed form, measures 0.24 metres high and 0.49 metres across its arms, with a raised central boss on each face; Peter Harbison noted it in his 1992 survey of Irish stone crosses. A photograph from 1992, recorded by Healy, documents a further erect slab with a circular depression at its centre, enclosed by a raised band, and an equal-armed cross above it. One piece is notably absent: the head of a stone cross that once stood to the south-west of the church was removed at some point before Ó Ríordáin's 1947 account and is now held by the National Museum of Ireland.
