Graveslab, Dragoonhill, Co. Wicklow

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Dragoonhill, Co. Wicklow

What survives at Dragoonhill is not a complete object but a fragment, and that incompleteness is precisely what makes it worth attention.

Lying in a graveyard roughly ten metres south of a church, this granite slab is only 75 centimetres long and 12 centimetres thick, wider at its broken base than at its narrower top. That tapering shape is the telling detail: the slab broadens from 40 centimetres at the upper end to 53 centimetres at the lower, which is the end we have. The break at the base indicates that this is, in fact, the bottom portion of a once considerably larger graveslab, the missing upper section being the part that would have carried the primary decorative cross.

Cut into the face of the surviving granite is an incised splayed cross, equal-armed and measuring 34 centimetres in both directions. A graveslab cross of this type is made by cutting lines directly into the stone rather than carving in relief, giving it a spare, deliberate quality. Below the lower arm of the cross, a narrow incised shaft, about 11 centimetres wide, runs down the face of the stone. This shaft would originally have continued upward through the missing section, connecting the cross visible here to the larger principal cross above, essentially acting as the stem linking two crosses on a single tall slab. The design, modest as it now appears, only makes full sense when the absent upper stone is mentally restored.

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