Cross-inscribed stone, Mám An Óraigh, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed stone, Mám An Óraigh, Co. Kerry

Worked into an ordinary lane wall on the southern slopes above Ventry Harbour, a flat stone roughly three-quarters of a metre tall carries a cross whose arms flare outward at each terminal, a design associated with early Christian stonecutting in Ireland.

It is easy to walk past without a second glance, which is precisely what makes it worth pausing over. The stone is not displayed or protected behind railings; it simply sits where someone placed it, incorporated into the boundary of a lane running north of the enclosure it once marked.

The site belongs to the early Christian church settlement known as Kilcolman, or Cill na gColmán in Irish, the church of the Colmáns, positioned on the southern slope of an east-west spur of Lateevemore on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry. The location, overlooking Ventry Harbour, places it within a landscape dense with early medieval religious and secular remains, part of the Corca Dhuibhne territory that stretches across the western end of the peninsula. The stone itself, measuring 0.75 metres high and 0.66 metres wide, was documented by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey, a landmark survey of the area's antiquities. Its cross with expanded terminals, where the arms of the cross widen into blunt or rounded ends rather than finishing in a plain point, is a motif found across early Christian sites in Ireland and western Britain, typically associated with the period between the sixth and twelfth centuries, though precise dating of individual stones is rarely straightforward without additional evidence.

The stone sits at the junction of landscape and lane, set into a working field boundary rather than preserved in isolation. Visitors to the area exploring the slopes of Lateevemore near Ventry would find it as Cuppage recorded it, embedded in the wall to the north of the ecclesiastical enclosure, its inscribed face visible on the outer surface.

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