Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
A small slab of red sandstone, barely half a metre tall, sits on an internal ledge within one of the more quietly absorbing early Christian sites in County Tipperary.
Carved into its face is a Latin cross in low relief, just three millimetres proud of the surface, subtle enough that poor light would make it easy to miss. The back of the slab and its thickness remain inaccessible, set as it is against the ledge, so what survives for the eye is essentially this single, modest declaration of faith pressed into local stone.
The slab forms part of the collection at St. Berrihert's Kyle, an ecclesiastical enclosure in the Glen of Aherlow long associated with the early Irish saint Berrihert. The site holds a remarkable concentration of carved slabs and cross-stones, relics of an early medieval tradition in which individual grave markers or votive stones were incised with crosses and occasionally other symbols. In 1946 the Office of Public Works constructed an oval stone enclosure on the site, stepped internally, to house and protect the collection; this particular slab, catalogued as slab 59 by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe in 1967, sits within the northern sector of that enclosure on one of its internal ledges. Its dimensions, 0.46 metres by 0.165 metres, make it one of the smaller pieces in the group, and the red sandstone from which it is cut is characteristic of the local geology of the Glen of Aherlow area.