Cross-slab, Sevenchurches, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Sevenchurches, Co. Wicklow

Lying flat against the northern wall of St Kevin's Church at Glendalough, the site known historically as Sevenchurches, is a granite slab that rewards a second glance.

It is broken clean in two, measures roughly two metres by just under one metre, and its surface carries something unusual even by the standards of early Irish ecclesiastical carving: two ringed crosses sharing a single shaft, set within a rectangular panel carved in relief. A ringed cross, sometimes called a Celtic cross, joins the arms of the cross within a circle, a form that appears frequently in early medieval Ireland, but the pairing of two such crosses on one shaft, with decorative rolls filling the curved spaces between the arms and the ring on one of them, gives this piece a compositional oddness that sets it apart from the more standard examples scattered across the same monastic site.

The slab was recorded and described by Harold Leask in 1950, who noted its dimensions and the specifics of its carving. Leask was one of the foremost authorities on Irish ecclesiastical architecture and monuments in the twentieth century, and his attention to this piece suggests it was considered significant even among the considerable wealth of carved stonework at Glendalough. Earlier documentation exists too: Robert Cochrane included drawings of the ecclesiastical remains here in a report published in 1925, drawn from work carried out around 1911 to 1912, which gives some sense of how long scholars had been trying to record the site's more easily overlooked fragments alongside its more celebrated monuments.

The slab lies immediately south of another cross-slab, so the two pieces sit in close proximity outside the church wall, which makes the spot worth approaching slowly. The recumbent position means the carving faces upward, visible from directly above rather than from a distance, and the relief work, though worn in places as one would expect of exposed granite, remains legible enough to make out the double-cross composition and the roll ornament in the quadrants.

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