Cross, Tomgarrow, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Crosses & Monuments
In a graveyard in Tomgarrow, County Wexford, there stands a granite cross that is easy to overlook precisely because it makes no effort to impress.
Plain, relatively modest in size at 0.67 metres high and 0.47 metres wide, it has a semicircular cross-section and a shaft that tapers as it rises toward the intersection of the arms. There is no inscription, no ornament, no obvious dedication. That restraint is itself informative, placing it within a tradition of unadorned memorial stonework that became common in rural Irish graveyards during the eighteenth century.
The cross is thought to date from around that period, though nothing more precise can be pinned to it. What makes the site slightly more layered is what is no longer there. As recently as the 1940s, a fragment of curved cut stone from what appears to have been a pointed doorway was recorded at the location, suggesting an earlier structure of some kind once stood nearby. Pointed doorways of that form are typically associated with medieval ecclesiastical buildings. That fragment has since disappeared, leaving the cross as the only surviving physical marker of whatever history accumulated here over the centuries.