Celtic cross
A cross with a ring around the point where the arms meet. It began as the ringed stone high cross of early medieval Scotland and Ireland, and since the 19th century has been a favourite form for gravestones.
Meaning
The early ringed crosses are high crosses: tall, free-standing stone crosses carved with interlace and scenes from the Bible, such as Daniel in the lions’ den or, probably, David killing the lion. Historic Environment Scotland describes the Kildalton Cross on Islay as a tool to help priests preach the gospel. Catholics and Protestants both use it. Most of Ireland’s revival crosses were made for Catholic patrons, but Michael Brennan found substantial 19th-century Celtic crosses in the Church of Ireland section of Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery, and in 2002 the metalsmith Stephen Walker noted that the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (USA) wears a silver Celtic cross, acquired on Iona in 1946, as an emblem of office.
Origin and history
Historic Environment Scotland traces the ringed high cross to the monastery of Iona. The high crosses of the late 8th century were the first free-standing stone crosses in Britain and Ireland, and the Kildalton Cross belongs to them. Its ring is carved from the same stone as the cross, while the ring of St John’s Cross on Iona was added later, perhaps after the cross fell; it has been argued that Kildalton was the first cross made with a pierced ring from the start, using what was learned from that repair. In Ireland, the two 8th-century high crosses at Ahenny in County Tipperary replaced earlier crosses of wood.
Its 19th-century revival
After a gap of almost 700 years, high-cross carving came back in 19th-century Ireland, this time for gravestones. Michael Brennan, writing in the Old Kilkenny Review, ties it to the revival in Celtic art that followed the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829; the building of Celtic crosses accelerated through the 1860s and 1870s and peaked in size and complexity in the 1880s and 1890s. In Scotland the Scottish Archaeological Research Framework records Celtic Revival gravemarkers by designers including Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Celtic cross war memorials from 1861, when Robert Rowand Anderson designed one for the 78th Highlanders at Edinburgh Castle.
What does the ring on a Celtic cross mean?
No early source says what the ring meant, so every reading of it is a later interpretation. J. Romilly Allen, in Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times (1904), traced it to the carving itself: a cross cut on a slab inside a circle, whose background carvers removed “one part of the background of the cross after another, until at last nothing but the cross itself was left”, leaving the ring and, at last, the pierced four-hole cross of Ireland. The Iona crosses suggest a practical side as well. Historic Environment Scotland records that the ring of St John’s Cross was added later, perhaps after a catastrophic fall, and that the Kildalton Cross may have been the first carved with its ring from the start, using lessons learned from that repair.
Worn today
Jewellery has replaced gravestones as the commonest form of the Celtic cross, Stephen Walker wrote in 2002, and craft objects, clothing and tattoos carry it too, as “personal expression of faith and heritage”. The revival that put it on graves had already taken it abroad: by the 1890s, Walker notes, Celtic crosses stood in cemeteries “wherever there was a Scottish or Irish Diaspora population”. In the Highlands and Islands they mark the graves of Gaelic poets and priests, such as the memorial to Mary MacKellar at Kilmallie of about 1890 and Father Allan McDonald’s on Eriskay of about 1905, which the Scottish Archaeological Research Framework reads as bringing the design back to “their Gaelic speaking culture of origin”.
Read next
- Next in Christian symbolsAnchorAn anchor, one of the oldest Christian symbols. It stands for hope, and in the catacombs of Rome it was also a way of drawing the cross without showing it openly.
- In Celtic symbolsCeltic knotA pattern of bands woven over and under one another with no loose ends: the interlace of early medieval art in Ireland and Britain, best known from the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels. Its makers left no record of what, if anything, the knots meant. Readings such as eternity and unending love are modern.
See also
Chi-Rho, Skull and crossbones, Ichthys, INRI, Latin cross, Orthodox cross.
Sources
- Statement of Significance: Kildalton Cross, Historic Environment Scotland, Sections 1.1, 1.2 and 2
- Kildalton Cross: History, Historic Environment Scotland
- Ahenny High Crosses, Heritage Ireland (Office of Public Works)
- Moone High Cross, Heritage Ireland (Office of Public Works)
- An Examination of the Modern Celtic Cross, Old Kilkenny Review (Kilkenny Archaeological Society), Michael Brennan, 2001, p. 36
- Case Study 15: Celtic Revival gravemarkers in Scotland, Scottish Archaeological Research Framework (ScARF)
- Celtic Revival Crosses, Stephen Walker, Walker Metalsmiths (2002), via the Internet Archive
- Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times, J. Romilly Allen (1904), via the Internet Archive, Chapter 6
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or crosses.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 26, 2026. How we research
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