Cross-slab, Lugduff, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Lugduff, Co. Wicklow

A few steps south of Reefert Church in the Glendalough valley, a small upright stone sits in the ground so quietly that it went unrecorded until quite recently.

It is less than half a metre tall and barely as wide, yet its face carries a broad Latin cross carved in slight relief, the arms and shaft each roughly fourteen centimetres across. The cross is the kind of simple, incised or low-relief marker that early medieval communities placed at significant spots, whether graves, boundaries, or places of prayer, and this one, slightly damaged and set firm in the earth, has the look of something that simply waited to be noticed.

Reefert Church itself is one of the older ecclesiastical remains within the Glendalough monastic complex, associated in tradition with the Kings of Leinster, and the ground around it was used for burial over a long period. The cross-slab sits approximately 2.6 metres south of the nave, close to the south-east corner of the church. Its dimensions are modest even by the standards of early medieval slab markers, and the fact that it was not previously recorded suggests it had been overlooked in earlier surveys of the site, perhaps dismissed as an unremarkable piece of stone or obscured by vegetation and ground cover over time.

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