658. This small island off the Donegal coast holds a special secret; at low tide, you can walk across the exposed seabed from the mainland, making your way through roughly 500 metres of what’s usually underwater terrain to reach this sheltered spot of good pasture land. The graveyard contains an extraordinary collection of early Christian monuments, including two medieval churches dedicated to St Mary’s and St Connell’s, a fragment of a high cross, four surviving cross slabs, and a particularly intriguing graveslab, though one cross-slab that once stood here has unfortunately gone missing.

The graveslab, positioned just south of St Connell’s Church, offers a fascinating glimpse into medieval Irish artistry despite its damaged state. Broken across its width with portions now lost, the stone originally measured approximately 1.83 metres by 0.75 metres, with a thickness of about 9.5 centimetres. What remains reveals an elaborate crucifixion scene featuring Christ in a long robe, his arms outstretched and his feet turned outward, possibly depicting shoes. The carving shows remarkable detail in its surviving sections, with six-legged animals and swans positioned above Christ’s arms; two swans and one animal on the left, one swan and a similar creature on the right.

Below Christ’s arms, the scene becomes even more complex, with an angel and a human figure wielding what appears to be a spear, though the left side has suffered damage over the centuries. Perhaps most intriguingly, a decorative band surrounds the central figure, transforming into an intricate pattern of combined spiral and triquetra designs beneath the feet of the adjoining figures. This sophisticated interweaving of Christian iconography with Celtic artistic traditions demonstrates the unique cultural fusion that characterised medieval Irish religious art, making this weathered stone a remarkable survivor from an era when Inishkeel served as an important ecclesiastical centre.