Cross (part of) — Report the wrong picture

What is recorded here

One chamber wall still holds the broken ring and knot-work of the Girley cross, while its lost parts have moved from a roadside graveyard to a kept depot. The stones are small enough to lift but old enough to have outlived the hands that cut them. They left the place where people first saw them, and they return only when someone remembers the shape they made.

The head of a high cross was formerly built into the roadside wall in the NE corner of the graveyard at Girley. A small sketch of this was published by Crawford (1926, 9-10). It was described by O'Davies in 1940 (SMR file) as 'Part of a perfect ring and cross, much covered with cement and difficult to see; top of ring broken. In centre is a cup-mark. At side of shaft just below ring apparently an interlaced pattern in raised frame.' Davies was mistaken in his identification of a cup-mark at the centre which is shown in a sketch by Du Noyer as a two-looped whorl (Harbison 1992, 94). Davies also recorded part of the shaft as follows: 'Part of cross-shaft, side apparently unornamented, front has a double frame and a very rubbed panel with squared interlaced ornament. Back built into walls.' Both pieces were photographed in the mid-1960s (Harbison 1990-1, 136-7). The head at this time had been removed from the wall and was lying loose in the graveyard. The piece of the shaft was recorded built into a corner of a wall. Neither fragment was visible when the graveyard was inspected in 1984. (Harbison 1990-1, 134-8; Moore 1986, 136, No. 1408) The cross head has been recovered (O’Reilly 2012) and is now kept in the OPW National Monuments depot at Trim (ME036-079----). It is a ringed cross but the top of the ring and shaft are missing (H c. 0.44m; span c. 0.4m), and it only has interlace decoration on every face, except what might be called the back, which has a moulding at the edge and a hollow (diam. c. 5cm) at the centre with a smaller hollow at the end of one arm, both of which might be secondary. The panels on the other sides consists mostly of interlace knots (dims of shaft c. 0.21m x c. 0.16m). Two other stones described (ibid.) as ’13 inches high, 10.5 inches wide and 6.5 inches deep (H c. 0.33m; 0.27m x 0.16m) and 14 inches high, 8.25 inches wide and 6.5 inches deep (H c. 0.36m; 0.21m x 0.16m)’ with double mouldings and interlace knots in panels are probably from the same cross, although the latter stone is badly damaged with decoration only on one face. Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of revised upload: 22 May, 2015

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