Graces Cross, Lacken, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Crosses & Monuments

Graces Cross, Lacken, Co. Kilkenny

Beside the gate of a house along the Tullaroan to Kilkenny road, a battered limestone base sits on a crude plinth of concrete blocks.

It is all that remains of a wayside cross erected to mark the spot where a young man of the Grace family of Courtstown died after falling from his horse, just two days after his wedding. The monument is known locally as Grace's Cross, and what makes it quietly arresting is not what survives but what was once legible on its faces: a full heraldic shield, Gothic inscriptions in raised lettering, and a plea to passers-by to pray for those who built it.

When the antiquarian William Mason recorded the cross in 1819, it was still substantially intact. He noted a shield on the west face bearing a lion rampant impaling a chevron between three arrows, beneath which appeared the names Edmund Grace and Catarin Archer. Inscriptions in raised Gothic characters ran around three sides, including a devotional appeal on the south face, "remember and think upon this cross when thou dost see and pray for them that build this cros", and the fragmentary Latin phrase "sacr. monumentum" on the north. By the time the historian William Carrigan examined it in 1905, the stone had already shifted or been turned, and a further inscription that had faced east in Mason's day was now facing south, much worn. Carrigan reconstructed it as recording the death of Edmond Grace on the 12th of August 1619, with a separate line for his wife Cathrin Sheth, whose date of death was apparently never cut into the stone. Mason had also illustrated the lower portion of the cross shaft, but that section had vanished entirely by Carrigan's visit, leaving only roughly half of the inscribed base or socket.

Today the surviving fragment measures around half a metre in height, with a rectangular mortice cut into its upper surface where the shaft would once have been socketed in place. The west face is completely shattered, and no inscription or carving remains visible anywhere on the stone. It rests on its concrete block plinth beside the entrance gate, easily overlooked by anyone who does not already know what it once was.

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