Brendan’s Cross: Completed and unveiled in Oregon, USA
Bundoran-born Brendan McGloin passed away in April 2025 with his final high cross unfinished. His brother, his sister and fellow sculptors completed it in his workshop in Kinlough, before it made its way across the Atlantic.
Modelled on Sligo’s 10th-century Drumcliffe high cross, the final sculpture of Brendan McGloin was recently unveiled in Oregon. It is the second of his high crosses to find its final resting place in the state. The first, a replica of the Clonmacnoise Cross of the Scriptures, stands in Portland.
On the morning of 23 October, the cross was officially unveiled and named Brendan’s Cross by George Fox University, which is named after the founder of the Quaker movement. The guests of honour were Brendan’s wife Allie and their four children, who saw the piece that the dedicated husband and father worked on up to his untimely passing in April 2025 duly honoured.
The university had commissioned Brendan in 2024 to create the monument for the ecclesiastical gardens of its new chapel. The university teaches everything from engineering to philosophy, in keeping with a Christian ethos that echoes the monasteries of an earlier time in Ireland.
Carved from Spanish sandstone supplied by McMonagle Stone of Mountcharles, Donegal, which had supplied Brendan for decades, the cross sat unfinished in his workshop for months after his death. One side was complete. The other was not. The shaft was three quarters finished with some panels and quadrants on the cross section completed.
His brother Francis McGloin explained that, on examining the shaft of the unfinished side, “the chiselling was not so deep”. It was as though the effort of the last months of Brendan’s life was spent ensuring much of the template was there for whoever was to complete the work.
Speaking at a visit to Drumcliffe last week, Francis described the cross as having been left to him and his sister Geraldine as custodians, to its fate. He said his brother “pushed his commission up the hill as far as he could”, and spoke of the weight of responsibility left to them in completing Brendan’s meticulous work.
Geraldine McGloin, an artist and ceramist, continued her brother’s work by sketching out the designs that were yet to be sculpted. Brendan had also left sketches in his workshop, intended one day to be etched upon the cross. With these, Geraldine’s sketches and the collaboration of other talented stone carvers, every effort was made to keep to the original integrity of Brendan’s work.
Before his passing, Brendan had already asked his sister to design a panel. “It was only afterwards that the gravity of that request truly registered,” said Geraldine: the sketches would be completed without him.
Fellow sculptors Séamus Dunbar, Jackie McKenna and Martha Quinn worked painstakingly to bring a project that had been so long in the making to completion.
“We were working in service of Brendan’s vision,” said Martha Quinn in a recent George Fox Digital film hosted by Dr Brian Doak, a professor of Biblical Studies at the university.
Carefully created by Francis, the cross left Brendan’s studio in Kinlough, Co. Leitrim, in late May for Dublin port. It travelled by sea to Rotterdam and on to Virginia, arriving at George Fox University by freight in early September. Francis and Séamus Dunbar were there to install it in the chapel’s Alumni Garden.
University president Dr Robin Baker, on a second visit to Ireland, recalled meeting Brendan for the first time, and how he shared his knowledge of the historical importance of the Irish High Crosses.
A few weeks after returning home from his first meeting, he learned of Brendan’s passing. He knew the half-finished cross he had commissioned was something few artists could pick up. Despite this, the sculptors were found.
Speaking in the film at St Columba’s church, Drumcliffe, Dr Baker said: “When he became really ill I never knew actually, I was planning on coming to Ireland when his wife wrote and said he was dying.” Dr Baker came over to Ireland and met with the family, saying: “They were simply committed, as part of his legacy, to find a way to finish it.”
Brendan, who lived just twelve miles from the former monastic site at St Columba’s church, Drumcliffe, left a legacy of work that includes a replica of the Clonmacnoise cross, which became the subject of an RTÉ Nationwide feature in 2012. He started the Clonmacnoise Cross in 2004, and quickly realised the magnitude of the task he had taken on. The process involved surveying, drawing, moulding and finally transferring those images onto stone, using 9th-century tools in honour of age-old practices. Francis at the time saw the importance of recording his brother’s work and the processes used.
“He resisted modern techniques, carving the old way with hammer and chisel.” Francis recalled his brother’s eagle eye for nuanced markings, and for clues to the origin of ancient monuments, details that would escape most people.
“The saddest thing is what Brendan never had a chance to leave behind,” Francis said after returning from Oregon. He spoke not only of his brother’s great achievements but of the wealth of knowledge about stonework that time had not permitted him to impart.
In a coincidental alignment with the Fall of Man that Brendan carved onto the cross, Francis referenced the opening of chapter 13 of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which suggests that a man’s importance can be measured by “the quality and number of his glories”. Francis said that this passage resonated with him deeply when thinking about his brother, and humanity in general.
In a George Fox Digital film recorded before his death, Brendan spoke of what makes the work worthwhile:
“The reward is probably the end result and the client’s response to it, as much as the financial reward. Stone is intangible and it’s here for a long time, and I guess I’ll be gone, but people in a hundred years will say, ‘Who made that?’” – Brendan McGloin