Cross-slab, Whitewell, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Whitewell, Co. Westmeath

At the roadside near Whitewell in County Westmeath, a thick limestone slab stands mounted on a purpose-built base, signposted with the name "De Profundis Stone".

That name comes from the opening words of Psalm 130, "De profundis clamavi", "Out of the depths I have cried", a psalm traditionally recited for the dead in Catholic funerary practice. The sign is a clue to what this stone once did: according to local tradition recorded on an information panel beside it, mourners would rest the coffin on the slab before carrying it into the adjacent graveyard. It is a small object with a specific, sombre purpose, and that particularity is what makes it worth pausing over.

The slab itself is a tapering or partially broken limestone flag, roughly 94 centimetres tall, 44 centimetres wide at the top, and 14 centimetres thick. Incised near its upper face is a cross with T-shaped terminals, cut crudely into the surface rather than carved in relief. Cross-slabs of this kind, flat stones bearing an incised cross, are found at early medieval and later ecclesiastical sites across Ireland, though their precise dating is often difficult to pin down. This one is thought to pre-date 1700, though no firmer date has been established. When it was first formally recorded in 1980, it was still inside the graveyard, to the south of a church on the same site. At some point after that it was relocated to its current position at the road's edge, just to the south-south-west of the graveyard boundary, where it was given its base and its sign.

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