Select a site alphabetically from the choices shown in the box below. Alternatively, browse sculptural examples using the Forward/Back buttons.
Chapters for this volume, along with copies of original in-text images, are available here.
Object type: Part of cross-arm [1]
Measurements: H. 22.5 cm (8.8 in) (as placed); W. 32 cm (12.6 in); D. 18 cm (7 in)
Stone type: As Guiseley (St Oswald) 1
Plate numbers in printed volume: Ills. 302-5
Corpus volume reference: Vol 8 p. 160-1
(There may be more views or larger images available for this item. Click on the thumbnail image to view.)
One arm of a cross, type E. Both faces are edged with a broad flat moulding.
A (broad): At the end of the arm, a limbless animal with a sinuous double-outlined body and a long-jawed head with a small ear and round, ringed eye, bites its own tail. Below is the top of a rounded object crossed by a narrow horizontal band or edge, and below this a feature which is very difficult to interpret, but which is possibly the upper part of a human head, with the rounded object above representing its short hairstyle.
B and D (narrow): Plain
C (broad): Difficult to see in its present position but it is the double-stranded Stafford Knot (simple pattern E) terminal drawn by Collingwood. The strands feeding into the terminal have survived only on the left.
Collingwood (1915a, 179) also said that the feature below the animal on face A looked like the upper part of a face, but then dismissed the suggestion because of the probable size of the figure, which he assumed would have been a crucifix. But this is not improbably a head with short hair. Apart from examples of crosses in west Yorkshire with a possibly disembodied head at the centre (see Low Bentham 1, Ill. 542), there is no reason to assume that a figure would have been naturalistically proportioned, so a crucified figure could be a possibility — as, among several examples, Finghall 4, north Yorkshire (Lang 2001, ill. 244), where the head extends into the neck of the upper arm; or Stanwick 7 (ibid., ill. 768), where a completely non-naturalistic crucified Christ is shaped to the form of the cross-head. The format in which a Christ crucified is placed in the head of a cross with a decorative element above occurs several times in Yorkshire and seems to indicate Norse-Irish connections (Coatsworth 1979, I, 130–49).
