Stone sculpture, Cloone, Co. Leitrim

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Stone Monuments

Stone sculpture, Cloone, Co. Leitrim

In a graveyard in County Leitrim, attached to the site of an early church in Cloone, there is a headstone doing something that headstones rarely do: it carries three carved animals stacked in panels down its eastern face, rendered in false relief, a technique where the background is cut away to leave the design raised, giving the figures a shallow but sculptural presence against the stone.

At the top, a lion rampant; beneath it, another lion rampant, this one holding a shield; and below that, a hound. The stone is about one and a half metres tall, and in two of the panels the figures are slightly truncated on the left side, where the composition has been clipped by the straight edge of the stone itself.

The carving belongs to a distinctive local tradition and finds its closest parallel in the Dobhar Chú stone from Conwall burial ground in the north of the county. Both are thought to date from the eighteenth century, a period when ambitious figurative carving on vernacular headstones was far from unusual in Ireland, though the quality and ambition varied enormously from one region to another. The Leitrim examples share enough in common, in style and execution, to suggest either a shared workshop or at least a shared visual culture operating across the county during that period. The animals on the Cloone stone are heraldic in character, lions rampant being a staple of European heraldry for centuries, though how and why such imagery found its way onto a rural Irish headstone is a question the stone itself does not answer.

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