Graveslab, Dragoonhill, Co. Wicklow

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Dragoonhill, Co. Wicklow

A granite graveslab in Dragoonhill, County Wicklow, carries a cross that simply stops.

That unfinished quality is what sets it apart: where the shaft descends from the lower transom, it travels 23 centimetres down the face of the stone and then ends without a terminal, without the small crossing bar or decorative foot that convention would lead you to expect. Whether this reflects an interrupted carving session, a deliberate local tradition, or something else entirely, nobody has formally resolved.

The slab was found lying in a graveyard, roughly ten metres south of the east end of an associated church ruin, both features clustered together on the Dragoonhill site. The stone itself is complete rather than fragmentary, which makes the absent terminal all the more curious; this is not a case of breakage or wear. It measures just over a metre in length, tapering slightly from 44 centimetres wide at the top to 33 centimetres at the base, and is 10 centimetres thick. Cut into its surface is a splayed cross, a form in which the arms widen toward their ends, roughly 28 centimetres high and just over 25 centimetres across. The shaft below it runs in a clean, narrow channel, between 6 and 6.5 centimetres wide, before stopping abruptly. Incised graveslabs of this general type belong to a long tradition of early medieval and later Christian grave-marking in Ireland, with the cross cut directly into a flat stone rather than raised in relief, and they are found scattered across church sites throughout the country. What makes the Dragoonhill example worth pausing over is that small, deliberate-looking incompleteness at the base of the shaft, a feature that resists easy explanation.

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Pete F
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