Moylough Belt-Shrine

Moylough Belt-Shrine
The Moylough Belt-Shrine
Material	Copper-alloy, silver, mica, enamel, glass, millefiori, leather
Size	Length (extended): 90.1cm, width (average): 5.2cm[1]
Period/culture	c. 700 AD
Place	Moylough townland, County Sligo, Ireland
Present location	National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin
Identification	NMI 1945:81

The Moylough Belt-Shrine is a highly decorated 8th-century Irish reliquary shaped in the form of a belt. It consists of four hinged bronze segments, each forming cavities that hold strips of plain leather assumed to have once been a girdle belonging to a saint and thus the intended relic.^[2] It remains the only known relic container created as a belt-shrine,^[3] although such objects are mentioned in some lives of Irish saints, where they are attributed with "remarkable cures", and there are surviving reliquary buckles in continental Europe. The belt may have been influenced by 7th-century Frankish and Burgundian types.

The shrine was found in a peat bog by John Towey in April or May 1945, while he was cutting turf near Moylough, a small village on the outskirts of Tubbercurry, County Sligo. It is dated to the 8th century based on the similarity of its decorations, particularly the glass studs, to those on the Ardagh Chalice (8th or 9th century).

The art historian Raghnall Ó Floinn has described the belt as "one of the major treasures of Early Christian Irish art",^[4] and it is noted for both the evident craftsmanship, and quality of its design elements, including the cast-bronze medallions, enamel and stamped silver inlays, the animal and bird heads, and spiral patterns.^[5] It is held at the archaeology building of the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) in Dublin, where it is on permanent display in its Treasury room.^[6]