Writing With The Fish God's Pen

There is a stone cross from Riasg Buidhe, on Oronsay in the garden of Colonsay House and near an Oran’s Well. The cross has a large human face in the top arm. Although this carving has no Scottish parallels, it belongs to a group represented in Ireland, where a symbolic representation of the Crucifixion is probably inspired by Mediterranean art, a derivation strengthened in this instance by the fish-like tail.

- Colonsay and Oransay: An Inventory of the Monuments Extracted from Argyll, Vol. 5, The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, 1994
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This is a quite unusual cross, originally from the chapel of Riasg Buidhe on Colonsay. It is probably 7th - 8th century. It is quite small, about 4’3" in total. It was moved from its original place to beside the Tobar Odhrain [Oran’s Well] in the gardens of Colonsay House in about 1870. The latin cross finishes in a sort of fish-tail at the bottom, and a human head looks over the top of the cross.

- http://www.linegar2.demon.co.uk/saxceltx.htm
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If this cross was associated with Oran’s Well -- a marker for those depths, a remembrance of Oran’s descent -- then the fish-tail is doubly significant, first as representative of the half-woman, half-fish who came up from the sea to tell Columba that his abbey construction had disturbed and ancient water-spirit, and second as the undersea-voyaging shape of Oran as he travelled down from the footers of the Iona abbey where he was buried into the Celtic hell of Infrann, the land of northern ice.

Of both readings from that cross we can say that it marks a liminal space, where the veil is forever truly thin ... a way of seeing perhaps, that focuses on the blue depths within all surfaces ...