Tottenham High Cross was erected in Tottenham sometime between 1600 - 1609 by Owen Wood, Dean of Armagh, on the site of a wooden wayside cross first mentioned in 1409, and marks what was the centre of Tottenham Village. There is some speculation that the first structure on the site was a Roman beacon or marker, situated on a low summit on Ermine Street, which became the Tottenham High Road, as it is now known.
The high cross was constructed of plain brick, in an octagonal, four level design, which was later stuccoed and ornamented in the Gothic style in 1809.
Tottenham High Cross is often mistakenly thought to be an Eleanor cross, possibly because it is only a few miles south of one of the true Eleanor crosses at Waltham Cross.
Famous quotes containing the words high and/or cross:
“Brutes are deprived of the high advantages which we have; but they have some which we have not. They have not our hopes, but they are without our fears; they are subject like us to death, but without knowing it; even most of them are more attentive than we to self-preservation, and do not make so bad a use of their passions.”
—Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755)
“She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)