High Crosses

saint Patrick may well have been the fi rst person to bring a cross to County Down. Certainly, he is the one who is given credit for having been the fi rst Christian missionary in the area, sometime in the fi ft h century. His biographer, Muirchú, writing some two hundred years aft er his death, tells us that he landed at Inber Slane, probably on the estuary of the modern river slaney, and converted the local chief, Díchu, who lived ‘where st. Patrick’s barn is now’. Aft er visiting his old master on slemish Mountain in the neighbouring county of Antrim to the north, he returned to County Down, and set about his missionary activity in lecale, the south-eastern part of the county, an area which Muirchú says that he especially favoured. no one knows exactly where st. Patrick’s body lies, but saul – which gets its name from the old Irish word for a barn – has oft en been claimed as his burial place, rather than Armagh, arguably his most important foundation, which would dearly love to have been able to claim his relics. Downpatrick laid claim to his grave as early as the seventh century, though his name only came to be associated with the place in the twelft h century. Th e large stone bearing his name to the south of the Cathedral was only placed there just over a century ago without pretending to indicate precisely the saint’s last resting place. sadly, we have neither buildings nor genuine relics that we can reliably link directly with the saint, nor can any known buildings be dated to his lifetime in the fi ft h century. but what we do have are his writings, particularly his Confessio, which shows him to have been a humble man with a marvellously deep faith in his God, whose Gospel he successfully preached to the Irish. Th e church which Patrick organised on the ground was probably episcopal, of the kind that he had known in his british homeland during the dying days of the Roman empire. A bishop named Fergus, whose death was recorded in

Saul Church, the site of St Patrick’s first barn-church.

the year 584, would have held a see which the national Apostle would have created in what is now Downpatrick, but which formerly bore the name Dún Leth-glaisse. This suggests that a pagan fortification once three-quarters surrounded by water was peacefully transformed into a Christian bishopric. However, the sixth century is characterised by the rise and spread of monasteries great and small throughout the length and breadth of Ireland. In time they became the main focus of religious and cultural activity, as well as the writing of history by keeping annals telling of events that happened year by year. because of its three roughly concentric walls, the monastery of nendrum on strangford lough is widely taken as the model which shows us how at least some of these early monasteries may have been divided up into three separate areas. A central area was for the church and Round tower, a middle one was for the monks to live and work in, and the outermost one was for crops and garden produce. lawlor’s excavations there in the 1920s brought a number of cross-decorated stones to light, of a kind found in various forms on many other monastic and even non-monastic sites (such as saul) in County Down These small monuments have now, in many cases,

The monastery of Nendrum, photographed from the air. (Courtesy of the Northern Ireland Environment Agency)

Artist’s impression of the monastic site of Nendrum in about ? AD. (Courtesy of the Northern Ireland Environment Agency)

been moved into museums for protection – the ulster Museum in belfast, the Down County Museum in Downpatrick and the newry and Mourne Museum in newry. some of the nendrum examples are displayed in the small Heritage Centre on the site. For a monastery of its apparent importance, it is surprising that nendrum has produced no High Crosses that we know of – and the same applies equally to Movilla near newtownards. It is one of the chief churches of the ancient ulaid people which – other than a single cross-decorated stone – has very little to show for its former significance in early medieval Ireland. The only monumental remains of one of the most literary and best-documented of all the early Down monasteries, that at bangor near belfast lough, are an ancient sundial in a local park and the fragment of a cross-shaft two and a half feet high built into the wall of a private chapel on the Clandeboye estate, where a double-strand interlace looks out at us on the only visible side. It is the privilege of Downpatrick to have produced more High Crosses than any other location in the County, doubtless because this was the centre of power of the Dál Fiatach tribe, pre-eminent in south Down in the eighth and ninth centuries. Inscriptions found on crosses in the midland county of offaly have been shown in recent decades to contain the names of kings of Ireland and, although no inscriptions are known from ulster crosses, we should perhaps envisage the possibility of political involvement in the commissioning of stone crosses in the province, particularly in a regal centre like Downpatrick. such a consideration could also apply to the cross at Dromore, now the centre of a diocese but, over a thousand years ago, the capital of the uí echach Cobo who controlled the upland centres of central and western Down, just as the Dál Fiatach were the lords of the more low-lying coastal area of the county stretching from Carlingford to belfast lough. The locations of other High Crosses in the County are explicable because they have had religious associations for well over a thousand years. Donaghmore, for instance, contains the element Domnach, or sunday in Gaelic, which is undoubtedly one of the oldest Christian place-name elements in Ireland, going out of use in the naming of sacred places as early as the seventh century. Kilbroney is named after st. brónach, whose dates are unknown, but the ninth-century cross described below suggests the existence of a convent there at that time.

Donaghmore High Cross

More difficult to explain is why Drumgooland (Drumadonnell) and Clonlea have High Crosses, whereas high status monasteries such as Movilla and nendrum do not. we do not even know where the Drumgooland cross originally stood – in Deehommed, Drumgooland or Drumadonnell ? – none of which has any known early connections. The same also applies to Clonlea, not far from newry, where probably two of the three standing crosses are likely to be ancient. yet nothing is known of the history of the site which, however, has served as a graveyard for some considerable time. what unites almost all of the County Down crosses, in contrast to most other areas of the whole island (except for the barrow valley), is the material from which they were carved, namely granite. This is not to say, however, that they were the product of one and the same stone quarry. The noted geologist Ian Meighan, who has kindly examined all of the crosses, and whose detailed geological report is appended to this section, has shown that the granite crosses come from two distinct geographical areas, the Mournes

and somewhere near newry, though the locations of the actual quarries (if they still survive) have yet to be established. This would imply that none of the crosses was actually erected close to where the stone was quarried but, equally, it means that – with the possible exception of bangor (probably of sandstone) – the stone for the granite crosses need not have been brought more than twenty miles or so from the source of their material. nevertheless, use of the local granite made it more difficult for the sculptors to attain a finesse of modelling in their carvings of the human figure. It was a stone better suited to the carving of geometric patterns and interlace – and less liable to erosion. High Crosses get their name because that is how they were described by the Annals of the Four Masters in the tenth and eleventh centuries when mentioning one at Clonmacnois. but their origins go back beyond that. we may take it as certain that the stone crosses we see today were preceded by wooden examples which were probably erected as early as the seventh or eighth century in Ireland, at a time when stone crosses were being erected in england. Few of the Irish crosses can be dated as early as that, though one example at toureen Peakaun in tipperary bears lettering akin to that used on the eighth-century Ardagh Chalice, and clearly copies in stone certain techniques used by carpenters in wood. In Ireland, it was seemingly the ninth century which saw the erection of most of the surviving crosses – except for some (including two at Downpatrick, as we shall see below) which belong to the twelfth. The area around Clonmacnois on the shannon may have been one of the first in Ireland to produce stone crosses (and pillars) with carving in relief and bearing a variety of geometrical ornament. It was not until around 880 that we see the climax of High Cross carving with some of the truly great crosses in the midlands and east of the island, such as those at Monasterboice in County louth. but, at the same time, such scriptural crosses made their mark in ulster, not just in the major examples at Armagh and Arboe, Co. tyrone, but also in County Down at Downpatrick and Donaghmore. In the absence of inscriptions on the ulster crosses (though these could have been painted on only to fall a prey to the Irish weather in the meantime), we cannot say who it was who set them up – cleric or layman – or who carved them, monk or professional mason. where inscriptions occur on english

crosses, they tend to be placed at eye level to facilitate reading by those standing in front of them. The Irish crosses, in contrast, have their inscriptions at the bottom of the shaft, where they could most easily be seen by those praying on their knees in front of the cross. This would suggest that one of the reasons for erecting High Crosses was to provide a focus for people to pray. The crosses with scriptural scenes could be taken as bibles in stone, the varying selection of old and new testament panels carefully chosen to illuminate and explain doctrines of the Church. They were placed in frames on the faces and sides of the cross, almost like a modern comic strip, to provide visual aids for what was probably at the time a largely unlettered and illiterate public. These would almost certainly have been made more attractive by the addition of colouring, not a trace of which, sadly, has managed to survive a thousand years of exposure to the Irish climate. encouraging piety and prayer was, however, probably not the only reason why such crosses were erected. There is no evidence that they functioned as grave memorials as their modern counterparts do, but some may have been put up to commemorate events or people, even if they give us no clue as to who or what was being celebrated or remembered. others may have marked boundaries within or outside ancient monastic enclosures. whatever the reason for their creation may have been, they are one of the great glories of early Christian Ireland. some of them were so important as to make a very noteworthy and unique contribution to the sculpture of europe towards the end of the ninth century, and were worthy to be placed alongside the somewhat earlier book of Kells which could be seen as being something of a monastic miracle. The Down crosses may generally be divided into two categories – those with, and those without, biblical sculpture. both may be fitted into the ninth century, with the two main biblical crosses – Downpatrick and Donaghmore – being probably towards its end. Those without biblical figures are decorated with geometrical patterns among others which, however, have the disadvantage that they are not easy to date, but are unlikely to be very much earlier or later than the biblical examples. The exceptions among the crosses with figure sculpture are the two small examples built into a wall in the Cathedral in Downpatrick, which are twelfth-century in date. Though their small size scarcely merits their being called High Crosses, they are included here because of their style and ringed head.

The ring is not an Irish – nor a scottish – invention. The earliest known use of the ring around the junction of arms and shaft of a cross is found on a Coptic textile of the fifth or sixth century now preserved in Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the usA. but, in contrast to the parallel sides of its arms, most Irish crosses (including some in Down) have a circular narrowing on the upper and lower sides of the arms, the first instance of which appears to be on the manuscript known as the Dagulf Psalter now in the national library in Vienna, dating from around 795. The application of this feature to a free-standing cross may, thus, not have taken place much before the reign of Charlemagne on the Continent. Indeed, because of the danger of cracking the stone by boring a hole through its thickness from both sides in order to differentiate the ring from the shaft and arms, as on the Donaghmore cross, it is unlikely that stone was the first material on which the use of a ring on a cross was practised. The ring nevertheless had a practical purpose of preventing the heavy arms from snapping off. In addition to this structural function, the ring surrounding the Christ figure must also have had a symbolic significance which, at least in the case of the scriptural crosses, was probably cosmic, as early Christians would have seen the Crucifixion of Christ as the central, and literally the most crucial, event in the history of the universe. This interpretation seems to have more in its favour than seeing the ring (as some have done) as a Christian version of the laurel wreath draping the heads of Roman emperors as their outward sign of victory, or as a relict of the old pagan sun-symbol, given that Christianity may have been in Ireland for more than four centuries before the ring form was adopted as a popular and recognisable symbol.

A cross illuminated in the Dagulf Psalter (Cod. 1861, f. 67, courtesy of the Austrian National Library, Vienna). A ringed cross on a fifth- or sixth-century Coptic textile from Egypt (Artist: unknown, Coptic, 5th-6th century; sanctuary curtain, linen, wool, tapestry weave; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Centennial Fund: Aimee Mott Butler Charitable Trust, Mr. and Mrs. John F. Donovan, Estate of Margaret B. Hawks, Eleanor Weld Reid. 83.126).