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Reference
Date 2001
Event ID 922800
Category Documentary Reference
Type Reference
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/922800
The ruin of one of the two medieval parish churches of Arran stands in a burial-ground on the S-facing hillside 400m from the NW shore of Lamlash Bay. A late medieval graveslab is fixed to the E wall of the church, and others have been recorded in the burial-ground but cannot now be identified. A cross of unusual character, bearing a Crucifixion and probably of 16th-century date, was found E of the church in 1892 and has been re-erected in front of the present parish church in Lamlash (1). A disc-headed slab bearing a cross-of-arcs was recorded in the churchyard before 1867 and again exposed about 1910, but its present location is unknown. It was presumably one of the two 'cruciform head-stones' that were noted by 19th-century writers (2). It comprised a circular head about 0.27m in diameter rising from a plain slab about 0.3m wide, the overall height being about 0.55m (3). The head had a flat margin within which a cross-of-arcs was executed in low relief, the four diagonal 'petals' having sunken oval centres. Balfour states that there was a similar 'quatrefoil' on the other face of the stone.
(Stuart 1867, pl.122, 4; Allen and Anderson 1903, 3, 417; Balfour 1910, 1, 222 and pl.36, 2; Cross 1984, A5).
Footnotes:
(1) M'Arthur 1873, 164-70; Balfour 1910, 1, 219-24; Landsborough 1897, 74-7. Balfour states that the cross was brought from Holy Island about 1860 (Balfour 1909, 148-9).
(2) M'Arthur 1873, 166; Landsborough 1897, 77.
(3) The dimensions are calculated from the scale in Stuart 1867, pl.122, 4.
I Fisher 2001.
