Cross-inscribed stone, Baile An Chalaidh, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Crosses & Monuments
A stone slab standing just over a metre tall on the south-east edge of an ancient earthen mound, carved on both faces with crosses, is the kind of object that rewards a slow second look.
What makes this particular slab quietly unusual is the difference between its two sides. The east face carries a simple Latin cross whose head has become ill-defined over time, its shaft disappearing into the earth below. Turn the stone in your mind to the west face, and a different cross appears, this one with a bifurcated, or fish-tail, terminal at its head, a decorative flourish in which the top of the cross splits into two lobes, a detail that recurs in early medieval Irish stonework but is far from routine.
The slab sits within the larger of two enclosures lying within thirty metres of each other on low-lying, level ground roughly 250 metres south of Ferriter's Cove on the Dingle Peninsula. The site is recorded under the townland of Kilmore, or An Chill Mhór, a name that translates broadly as the great church, hinting at early ecclesiastical associations in the landscape even where standing structures no longer survive. The slab itself measures 1.23 metres in height, half a metre wide, and about nine centimetres thick. One detail worth noting: a circular depression visible below the right arm of the west-face cross is a natural feature of the stone, not a deliberate carving, a reminder that early medieval craftspeople sometimes worked with, rather than against, whatever the rock already offered. The archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region by J. Cuppage, published in 1986, provides the principal description of the stone and its enclosure.