Cross (remains): OS Grid Reference – SW 6456 3449
Getting Here
Nice ‘n easy: get into the village and walk through the church gates and there, on your left on the grass verge, a plinth and the cross-head sits before thee!
Archaeology & History
When the great Arthur Langdon (1896) wrote about Crowan’s cross-head, he was puzzled. At the time it was in the garden of a local surveyor in the nearby village of Praze-an-Beeble, but its origins seemed mysterious. The surveyor in question, a Mr William Carah, wrote to Langdon and said,
“It seems a mystery where the cross we have originally came from. A friend of mine, living abroad at present, saw it, I think, at a farm-place, being used as a bottom for a beehive. He asked the people for it, intending to fix it somewhere. At any rate, when he left England he had not done so, and at my request they gave the cross to me.”
The condition of the cross-head wasn’t too good and Langdon suggested it had “received some very rough treatment” – no doubt when it was hacked from its shaft. With his usual precision he gave the dimensions of the cross-head as follows:
“Height, 1 ft. 6 in.; width, 1 ft. 8 in.; thickness: at the bottom 6½ in., at the top 5½ in.
Front. — Part of a small conventional figure of Christ, extending to the knees, at which point the fracture occurred which separated the head from the shaft.
Back. — The remains of a mutilated Latin cross in relief.”
The stone shaft or menhir that once supported this carved head has, it would seem, long since been destroyed.
References:
- Blight, J.T., Ancient Crosses and other Antiquities in the West of Cornwall, Simpkin Marshall: London 1858.
- Courtney, R.A., The Evolution of the Wheel Cross, Beare & Sons: Penzance 1914.
- Doble, Gilbert H., A History of the Parish of Crowan, King Stone Press: Shipston-on-Stour 1939.
- Langdon, Andrew, Stone Crosses in West Cornwall, Federation of Old Cornwall Societies 1999.
- Langdon, Arthur G., Old Cornish Crosses, Joseph Pollard: Truro 1896.
© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian