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 quiet accumulation of carved stones tells a complicated story about early Christian practice and the long life of a single sacred site.

What makes the collection unusual is not any single piece but the sheer variety gathered together: cross-slabs of different sizes and different levels of craft, ranging from a roughly incised Latin cross on a small slab barely half a metre tall to a much larger stone decorated with cup and ring marks, a motif more commonly associated with prehistoric rock art that here appears alongside distinctly Christian ornamentation.

The slabs vary considerably in ambition. One, standing 0.95 metres high, carries a Latin cross in shallow relief with circles marking the top and each arm end, and semicircular curves filling the space below the arms, a composed and deliberate design. Another, just 0.49 metres tall, has only a simple incised cross, the work of a less practised hand or a more modest commission. Alongside the slabs is the head of a small Tau cross, so called because its shape resembles the Greek letter tau, a T-form rather than the more familiar Latin cross. This fragment, noted by Peter Harbison in 1992, has a central boss on both faces. There are also fragments of two rotary querns, the paired grinding stones used to mill grain, their presence suggesting the site had a practical domestic or communal dimension as well as a devotional one. A granite cross-base survives outside the chancel wall, though the cross it once supported is long gone. The head of another stone cross, formerly standing to the south-west of the church and recorded by Ó Ríordáin in 1947, was removed to the National Museum of Ireland, leaving only a documentary trace where a monument once stood. A photograph from 1992 records yet another slab, erect at the time, bearing a central circular depression ringed by a raised band with an equal-armed cross above it, its current condition unspecified.

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