Cross - Wayside cross (present location), Summerhill, Co. Meath
Co. Meath |
Crosses & Monuments
On the village green at Summerhill in County Meath stands a sandstone cross-shaft so densely carved that it reads almost like a stone encyclopaedia: tulips growing from a vase, Tudor roses, a procession of eight animals facing south along one face, ivy scrolls with a biting creature at the base, angels clutching shields at the corners of the collar.
What makes it stranger still is that it was never finished. One of the mortices cut to receive the upper sections of the cross was left incomplete, suggesting work stopped before the piece could be assembled in its final form, even as a Latin cross on a stepped plinth was already appearing on William Petty's later parish map of the area.
The shaft carries an inscription on its south face, in the Latin formula typical of late medieval memorial carving: ORATE PRO ANIMA PETRE LINCE, AD 1554, meaning "pray for the soul of Peter Lynch." The Lynches were the family associated with the nearby demesne and Lynch's Castle, and the cross was most likely commissioned to stand at or near the northern entrance to that estate. The carving programme is unusually elaborate for a wayside cross, a type of roadside devotional marker common across Ireland, and the iconography mixes the sacred with the heraldic. The eastern face alone offers a dog, a hen, a horse, a collared dog, a goat, a lion, a doe, and a stag with notably large antlers. The upper portion of the shaft, where it survived, shows the upper body of Christ in a crown of thorns, and a shield bearing the Lynch family arms: a black cross on silver, between four red lions rampant with blue claws and tongues, surrounded by winged angels in pleated tunics. The collar, the Latin cross head, and the Lynch armorial stone that once accompanied the monument are all now missing.
The shaft itself, at 1.74 metres tall and roughly 29 by 19 centimetres in section, is not large, but the density of carving across all four faces rewards close attention. It sits on the village green, relocated from what may have been its original position but otherwise accessible in the open air, a sixteenth-century commission caught permanently between intention and completion.
