The story of Ardboe High Cross
The story begins around 590 AD, when Saint Colman is said to have founded a monastery on this elevated point above Lough Neagh. The name Ardboe, Ard Bó, means 'height of the cow', tied to a local tradition that a miraculous cow's milk helped build the church. For centuries this was a working religious settlement at the edge of Ulster's great lake.
The high cross itself is believed to have been raised in the ninth or tenth century, carved from sandstone to stand 18.5 feet tall and 3.5 feet wide. That makes it the tallest high cross in Northern Ireland, and the twenty-two panels covering its faces turned scripture into pictures for people who could not read, from Adam and Eve to the Crucifixion.
The monastery did not survive the medieval period intact. It was destroyed by fire in the twelfth century, and the church ruins that stand beside the cross today date from later medieval and post-medieval rebuilding on the same sacred ground. The graveyard around it remained in use, layering centuries of local history over the early Christian site.
Today the cross is cared for as a scheduled and national monument. Though its head is damaged, it is the only high cross in Northern Ireland to remain largely complete and original, which is why it is reckoned the finest surviving example in Ulster, still standing in the open where it was raised more than a thousand years ago.