Traditions are rarely easy to explain. Their origins are imprecise and buried under layers of interpretation, generations of hearsay. In archaeology, you can dig and measure and carbon date but in anthropology or folklore you just ask questions and try to see patterns in the answers. The only thing we can know for sure is that traditions tell a story.
The Tradition
There’s a hell of a story waiting under the skeagh at Brandycross for anyone who takes the time to ask the right questions. On the road from the Quay to Kilmore, if you slow down just before the cross of Kilturk, you’ll see a heap of small wooden crosses piled up in the ditch under a whitethorn tree. They are laid there by every funeral procession that goes from the Quay to Kilmore graveyard. The mourners stop for a minute to lay the cross. In the past, the coffin touched the ground only here before being lowered into the grave. There is a corresponding heap at Sarshill closer to the graveyard itself. Small, plain wooden crosses represent each death the parish suffers. Made from boards leftover from the coffin. Left to rot back into the ditch over time and be buried by fresh, new crosses for every person lost.
The Story
The story isn’t the crosses so much as how they came to be there in the first place. Asking around won’t get you far, variations on the answer “it’s a Kilmore tradition, we’ve just always done it” but if you do some digging (metaphorical, not archeological) in the National Library of Ireland, Dúchas and the UCD folklore archive, you’ll find incredible primary sources telling the story of this tradition back to the mid-19th century. Mr Thomas Doyle, aged 53, Ballask, Kilmore told a child conducting the Schools Scheme between 1937 and 1939 that the crosses were originally painted in various colours. Another Dúchas source hypothesises that the crosses were hung from a hawthorn or ash tree because of their significance in pre-Christian Ireland. This is quickly sanitised by the reinterpretation of the folklorist Máire Ní Dhonnchada with the idea that the tree was merely a stand in for a shrine of the passion that had been levelled during the colonial demolition campaign against the catholic church. Not pagan, definitely not pagan!
The next layer of the story is both farther back and further away. Not quite the mists of time but the mists of the Pyrenees. Charlemagne’s cross at Roncevalles has long been a waypoint on the Camino Ingles, following the footsteps of St James through the mountains to Santiago. That cross commemorates the soldiers lost at the battle of Roncevalles in 777AD and would have been familiar to the many Irish pilgrims making their way to the sea at Santiago. The most likely explanation for the origin of the Kilmore crosses is that this pilgrim tradition of laying crosses to commemorate the dead spread up through France and over to Ireland with the founding of Cistercian monasteries like the complex now in ruins at Tintern. These were not the ascetic, isolationist monasteries of Iona and Skellig Michael. They were Anglo-Norman centres of learning connecting Ireland to the continent and a new wave of Christian practices like the Camino de Santiago.
The practice was widespread throughout the island, had died out almost everywhere but this small pocket of Forth & Bargy by the time of the Schools Scheme in the late 1930s. Why did it survive here? That needs more digging to uncover!
