I’ve just run across a link to a exhibition currently underway at the Collin Barracks, Dublin, site of the National Museum of Ireland–an exhibition of antiquarian plaster-of-paris casts of six of Ireland’s extraordinary High Crosses. (www.museum.ie/en/exhibition/irish-high-crosses.aspx) These casts were made 1896-1908 for display in international fairs and museum collections–to export, in this case Ireland’s, heritage in a more tangible way than, say, print and film could provide. The crosses from Ahenny, Monasterboice, Drumcliffe and Dysert O’Dea range in date from the 9th to the 12th centuries and are some of the finest examples of early mediaeval Irish sculpture, “stone jewels” from Ireland’s Golden Age.
(And, coincidentally, this just in from the historian, author and blogger Senchus on the Pictish cross-slab of Crail: http://wp.me/phb0D-ix ...)
Paula de Fougerolles' The Chronicles of Iona 