Cross-slab, Sevenchurches, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Sevenchurches, Co. Wicklow

A modest slab of mica schist, less than a metre tall, sits quietly about eight metres south-west of the famous High Cross at Glendalough, the monastic site in County Wicklow known historically as Sevenchurches.

It carries no elaborate carving, no knotwork, no figural imagery. Just a plain incised outlined Latin cross, cut directly into the stone surface, unadorned and easy to overlook entirely if your eye is drawn, as most eyes are, towards the grander monuments nearby.

Patrick Healy recorded the slab in a 1972 survey of ancient monuments at Glendalough, cataloguing it as number 179 in his unpublished Office of Public Works report. He noted its dimensions precisely: 0.93 metres by 0.47 metres, and identified the material as mica schist, a metamorphic rock with a characteristic layered, slightly glittering surface, common in the geology of the Wicklow uplands. The cross itself is of the Latin form, meaning it has one arm longer than the other three, and is outlined rather than raised or deeply carved, giving it a restrained, almost sketched quality. Cross-slabs of this kind are found across early medieval Irish monastic sites, often marking graves or serving as boundary or devotional markers within a monastic enclosure. They range from the highly decorated to the entirely plain, and the Glendalough example sits firmly at the unembellished end of that spectrum.

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