Cross-slab, Taghshinny, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Taghshinny, Co. Longford

In the graveyard at Taghshinny, County Longford, a small fragment of carved stone once lay in rubble close to the north wall, easy to overlook and easier still to misread.

It is a cross-slab, one of two found on the site, and it survives only as two joined pieces forming the lower portion of what was once a larger monument. Measuring just 41 centimetres high and 31 centimetres wide, it is modest in scale but not in detail. On one face, part of the cross stem and one complete arm are visible, each terminating in the characteristic D-shaped endings found on early medieval Irish stonework. Where the arm meets the stem, a smaller incised cross, itself with D-shaped terminals, sits enclosed within a circle. It is the kind of layered, careful carving that suggests the work was considered, not incidental.

The stone also carries a fragmentary inscription running parallel to the right-hand side of the stem, reading from top to bottom: AELM..A..RE. Cross-slabs of this type were typically memorial or devotional markers, and inscriptions on them most often followed a formula beginning with the Old Irish phrase OR DO, short for OROIT DO, meaning "a prayer for", followed by a personal name. Researcher Corlett, writing in 1998 and again in 2001, proposed that the surviving letters are the remnants of just such a dedication, with the full text likely reading something close to "a prayer for Mael Máire". Mael Máire, meaning "devotee of Mary", was a name used in early medieval Ireland, and the missing letters at the left-hand edge of the stone would, on this reading, have carried the opening formula. The speculation is plausible, though the damaged state of the inscription means certainty is out of reach.

The stone is no longer at Taghshinny. In 1999 it was removed from the graveyard by the National Museum of Ireland and taken into safe keeping at their Kildare Street premises in Dublin, where it is held under registration number 1999:59. A second cross-slab remains associated with the site, though the more inscribed of the two now exists at some distance from the Longford ground it once marked.

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