Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
Among the cross-slabs gathered at St. Berrihert's Kyle in County Tipperary, one small piece of red sandstone, barely thirty centimetres in its longest dimension, carries a Latin cross carved in relief no deeper than six millimetres.
The carving is shallow enough that you might almost miss it, yet it represents the same devotional tradition found across early medieval Ireland, where communities marked their sacred spaces with incised or relief-cut crosses on local stone. What makes this particular slab quietly unusual is its setting: it sits on an internal ledge within an oval stone enclosure, stepped on the inside, that was purpose-built by the Office of Public Works in 1946 to protect and display the collection of slabs found here.
St. Berrihert's Kyle is an early ecclesiastical enclosure, a defined sacred precinct associated with an early Irish saint. The Kyle, a word derived from the Irish term for a wood or narrow place, preserves a concentration of early Christian carved stones. The particular slab catalogued as number 69 by scholar Ó hÉailidhe in 1967 is composed of red sandstone and is modest in every physical respect, measuring roughly 0.3 metres by 0.18 metres. Its thickness and reverse face are not visible, presumably because it is set into or against the ledge. The cross itself is a plain Latin form, meaning a vertical shaft longer than the horizontal arm, executed in low relief rather than incised line. That the OPW chose to construct a formal stepped enclosure around this group of slabs in the mid-twentieth century speaks to how seriously the site was regarded even then, at a time when many comparable early medieval monuments were receiving far less careful treatment.