Anyone familiar with Early Christian Irish art might assume that this is an engraved boulder at a Christian or Christianised site in Ireland.

Indeed, there is a very fine cross-engraved boulder (with ogam incriptions) at Maumanorig, near Dingle in county Kerry.

click on the picture to enlarge

The principal design on the Maumanorig stone is a quatrefoil divided by a cross within a circle. The other cross is a Greek cross with expanded terminals.

Quatrefoils also appear on the more common Irish grave-slabs, which were laid flat above the grave of a monk. This fragment has been 'made whole' with the use of concrete.

However, the design carved on the Canadian stone might just as easily be Scandinavian, Pictish or Anglo-Saxon - for interlace was beloved by all these cultures - in metalwork, in manuscript and in stone - during the early mediæval period up to the year 1,000 of the Christian (or Common) Era.

The fact that the points of the quatrefoil correspond with the cardinal points does not help.

Scandinavians certainly reached Canada, after discovering Iceland and then Greenland. But, according to the Íslendingabók, Irish monks are alleged to have arrived on Iceland before the Scandinavians. There is absolutely no corroboration of this, nor has any Irish cross-slab or cross-pillar turned up in Iceland, which would be very curious if there had been a monastic settlement there.

Irish monks had a passion for engraving stones with cross-designs, some of them highly abstract, as these pages illustrate. Might Irish monks, not having ever gone to Iceland, actually sailed more directly and lengthily across the Atlantic to reach the St Lawrence river ?

Only the discovery of an ogam inscription or the remains of a circular stone cell would confirm that hypothesis. In the meantime, we can only speculate.

The boulders in the Parc des Rapides are not in their original place, as the letter below confirms.

au sujet d'une Pierre gravée aperçue en bordure du fleuve Saint-Laurent au Parc des Rapides à Ville de Lasalle. [...] Avec mon collègue François Bélanger, archéologue à la ville de Montréal, nous sommes allé faire un tour d'observation sur le site en question. Nous avons pu constater que la berge est composée de paliers aménagés, non en places. CAD fait avec des remblais d'une provenance autre que les sols d'origines. Cet aménagement auraient probablement été fait vers les années 80-90. Les amas de roches sont situés sur le dernier palier en bordure de la grève. Ces amas semblent servir de répère pour un chemin d'entretien qui longe de rive. Nous avons pu voir 2 autres amas de pierres dans la zone immédiate à la pierre. Pour nous malheureusement, il n'y a pas beaucoup d'indices pour déterminer l'origine de cette pierre à un événement ou même une époque. Comme les sols autour sont remaniés, nous ne pouvons donc pousser plus loin la recherche du point de vue archéologique. Je pense que vous avez trouvé de bon indices quand à la signification du symbole gravé, peut être un historien pourrait vous fournir de plus amples renseignements sur l'utilisation de ce symbole et à quel moment il aurait pu être utilisé. Bien à vous, Alain Vandal Musée d'Archéologie et d'Histoire de Montréal

A Breton origin, whether at the time the cod-fisheries off Eastern Canada were discovered, or before the time of Columbus, seems very unlikely. Rock-engravings from historical times are rare in France - although there is one megalithic tomb near Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val (Tarn-et-Garonne) which has been Christianised with the simple expanded Greek cross of a type found both in Ireland (e.g. the Maumanorig stone, above) and in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Dolmen de Clauzel, St-Antonin-Noble-Val.

My own belief, without a shred of solid evidence, is that this stone may well have been carved by Irish monks. Followers of St Brendan the Navigator were more likely to have carried stone-chisels than the followers of Erik the Red. But we will probably never be able to do more than speculate.

Videos of the Canadian Stone

 

Forums where the carving is discussed:

http://verdunconnections.blogspot.ca/search?q=Petroglyph

http://www.arbre-celtique.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1597