Cross-slab, Ráithín Uí Bhuaigh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ráithín Uí Bhuaigh, Co. Kerry

Among the many early Christian cross-slabs scattered across the Dingle Peninsula, one thin rectangular stone at Ráithín Uí Bhuaigh graveyard carries a carved motif that appears nowhere else in the entire regional corpus.

Its upper left corner is broken away, and it rests somewhat precariously against a collapsed lintelled grave, the kind of stone-roofed burial structure common in early medieval Ireland. Yet despite its battered condition, the incised decoration is coherent and precise: interlaced triangular panels arranged within a square, from which descends a vertical shaft of three lines bearing two arms that terminate in "C" scroll returns. The "C" scrolls appear on other early slabs in the area, but this particular combination of interlace and geometric panelling has no known parallel on either the Dingle or Iveragh Peninsulas.

The graveyard itself, situated on elevated ground at around fifty metres above sea level and overlooking Dingle Harbour less than a kilometre to the north, has a layered history that is still being untangled. A raheen, meaning a small ring-fort or early enclosed settlement, originally defined the burial ground, and traces of that curved enclosure were still legible on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1896. In 1870, Lord Ventry substantially remodelled the site, planting trees, constructing squared-off enclosing banks, laying a new roadway, and building a family mausoleum, marked simply as "Vault" on the map. A survey carried out by Laurence Dunne in 2010 identified at least thirty archaeological artefacts across the graveyard, including sixteen previously unrecorded cross-slabs, most of them concentrated within the limits of that earlier enclosure. Cross-slab 564 was among the loose and displaced examples he found, its unusual geometry suggesting a carver working with a design tradition that, for now at least, has no local counterpart.

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