Cross-slab, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

A small stone barely half a metre tall, deeply sunk into the ground beside a house on a remote Mayo island, carries incised crosses on both of its broad faces.

That detail alone sets it apart. Most early medieval cross-slabs present a single decorated face to the world; this one, on Inis Gé Thuaidh (Inishkea North), was carved on both sides, suggesting that whoever cut these lines intended the stone to be seen in the round, perhaps as a freestanding marker in an open space rather than something pressed against a wall or a grave.

The stone sits on the Bailey Mór mound, a raised earthwork that forms part of a broader early ecclesiastical landscape on the island. It is a narrow, upright piece of worked stone, just 0.19 metres wide and 0.08 metres thick, and its angular top appears to be broken, so the original height is unknown. The east face carries a simple single-line cross incised with thin grooves roughly two centimetres wide, the horizontal arms stretching almost the full width of the stone. The west face bears a similar cross, its proportions slightly different but the technique the same: plain, deliberate lines, no ornament, no inscription. Françoise Henry, the art historian whose 1951 paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland brought Inishkea North's monuments to wider scholarly attention, helped establish that the island preserves a remarkable concentration of early Christian material, and this cross-slab is among the monuments she documented. The stone is a National Monument in state ownership.

Inishkea North lies off the Mullet Peninsula in County Mayo and is uninhabited today, which means reaching the cross-slab requires a boat crossing and some willingness to navigate an island without waymarked paths. The stone stands close to the south-west corner of a roofless house, which serves as a useful landmark once ashore. Its small scale means it is easy to walk past, but crouching down to examine both faces, and noticing how the crosses differ slightly from one another in their proportions, is where the real interest lies.

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