Cross, Shanbally, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Crosses & Monuments
In a field in Shanbally, County Galway, a fragment of stone cross survives in a place that compounds its quiet strangeness: a children's burial ground set within the grounds of an older ecclesiastical enclosure.
The cross itself is small, measuring roughly 35 centimetres long and 30 centimetres wide, and only part of it remains. The head and the left arm are still there; the rest is gone.
The fragment was recorded by Higgins in 1987 and described as a plain cross, meaning it carries no decorative carving or inscription. It is cut, somewhat roughly, from a block of weathered limestone. It sits in the western half of what would once have been a cillín, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used historically for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal church burial. These sites are found across Ireland, often at the margins of older sacred enclosures, and their presence tends to mark the layering of religious practice across centuries. Here, the cillín occupies the south-eastern quadrant of a wider ecclesiastical enclosure, suggesting the ground has been in use, in one form or another, for a very long time. The cross fragment is the kind of object that survives not because anyone particularly preserved it, but because it was simply never moved.