Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
A fragment of a carved cross, barely the size of a hardback book, sits on top of a wall at one of Tipperary's more quietly remarkable early Christian sites.
The slab, grey sandstone and only a centimetre thick, preserves just the lower portion of a cross carved in low relief, the relief itself a mere three millimetres proud of the surface. The back is entirely plain. It is, in other words, a remnant of a remnant, and yet its survival within the enclosure at St. Berrihert's Kyle gives it a context that makes it considerably more than a curiosity.
St. Berrihert's Kyle is an ecclesiastical enclosure in the Ardane area of County Tipperary, associated with the early Irish saint Berrihert. The site contains a notable collection of early cross-slabs, cross-slabs being flat stones incised or carved with a cross, often associated with early medieval Irish monastic and burial practice. The small slab in question was catalogued by Pádraig Ó hÉailidhe, who numbered it slab 68 in his 1967 study of the site's carvings. It sits in the north-east sector of an oval stone enclosure that was built by the Office of Public Works in 1946 to house and protect the collection of slabs; the enclosure is stepped internally, designed to display the stones at a legible angle. The slab itself sits on top of the wall rather than within the stepped interior, which gives it a slightly peripheral position relative to the more complete pieces gathered inside.