Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

A small slab of red sandstone, barely sixty centimetres long, sits on top of a wall in the eastern sector of St. Berrihert's Kyle in County Tipperary.

What makes it quietly remarkable is not its size but its detail: carved on one face is a Latin cross in low relief, only three millimetres proud of the surface, with round hollows worked into the angles where the arms meet the shaft. Turn the slab over and you find a second composition on the reverse, an outlined cross with a very short shaft, slight double-rounded hollows in the angles, and a single line descending from the base of the shaft to terminate in a round hollow. The whole design is bounded by a lightly pocked line. Two carvings, one stone, each face its own careful arrangement of geometry and hollow.

St. Berrihert's Kyle is an early medieval ecclesiastical enclosure, a site associated with the obscure saint Berrihert, and it contains a notable collection of cross-slabs of the kind commonly found at early Irish monastic sites, where carved stones served commemorative and devotional purposes. The slab catalogued as 15A/15B was recorded and described by Ó hÉailidhe in 1967. The oval stone enclosure in which it now sits, stepped internally, was constructed by the Office of Public Works in 1946, a mid-twentieth-century intervention intended to gather and protect the carved stones that survive at the site. The enclosure is therefore relatively modern, but the slabs themselves belong to an altogether older devotional landscape.

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