Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
A small grey sandstone slab, barely three-quarters of a metre tall and narrowing slightly towards its base, sits on top of a wall in the eastern part of an ancient ecclesiastical enclosure in the Glen of Aherlow.
What makes it worth pausing over is not its size but its surface: a Latin cross whose shaft is rendered not as a plain incised line but as a narrow panel of double ribbon twist, while each of the short arms takes the form of an empanelled saltire, a diagonal cross set within a defined border. The background spaces on either side of the cross are filled with an irregular chevron pattern, and if you turn the slab over, the reverse carries a bordered panel of irregular lattice-work. The overall effect is one of considerable decorative ambition compressed into a very modest object.
The slab belongs to a site known as St. Berrihert's Kyle, a kyle being an early Irish ecclesiastical enclosure, typically associated with a local saint and used as a place of burial and devotion over many centuries. The oval stone enclosure in which this and other slabs now sit was built by the Office of Public Works in 1946, providing a formal setting for the collection of early carved stones gathered from the surrounding area. The cross-slab itself was catalogued and described by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe in 1967, who identified it as slab 2A/2B and noted its tapering grey sandstone form: 0.76 metres high, 0.22 metres wide at the top, and 0.08 metres thick. The combination of ribbon twist, saltire arms, chevron infill, and lattice ornament on a single small slab points to a period of early medieval stoneworking in which geometric interlace and knotwork were applied with considerable care even to relatively modest grave markers.