Cross - Tau cross, Ballypatrick, Co. Tipperary

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross – Tau cross, Ballypatrick, Co. Tipperary

A small field in Ballypatrick, County Tipperary holds a cross that lacks the top arm most people would recognise.

Instead of the familiar Latin or ringed form, this cross is T-shaped, a type known as a Tau cross after the Greek letter it resembles. Carved from red sandstone and modest in scale, measuring roughly 38 centimetres wide and 26 centimetres high, it is easy to overlook. That modesty, however, belies the age and character of what surrounds it.

The field itself was recorded as the 'Field of the Early Church Site' and was considered sacred to St. Bearachan. Writing in 1908, the historian Power noted that an early church once stood on the western side of a small stream running through the area. Alongside the Tau cross, the site yielded quern stones, the kind of rotary grinding stones used for processing grain in early medieval Ireland, and a stone object described as resembling a chalice. That last piece was, at the time of Power's writing, held in Waterford Museum. The cluster of objects, a cross, a possible liturgical form, and domestic grinding stones, suggests a small monastic or devotional community rather than any grand ecclesiastical foundation, the kind of quiet, localised Christian settlement that once dotted the Irish landscape without ever attracting much documentary attention.

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