Cross, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

In the Glen of Aherlow, at the foot of the Galty mountains, a small island sits within a marsh, reachable only by a few stone steps over soggy ground.

What makes it quietly odd is not what stands there but what lies loose on the ground beside it: a broken cross-base, roughly the size of a thick doorstep, its socket, the shaped hollow that would once have held an upright stone cross firmly in place, now open to the air because the edge of the stone snapped away at some point along its length. The cross it once anchored is long gone.

The island belongs to a place known as St Berrihert's Kyle, an early medieval ecclesiastical enclosure associated with a seventh-century saint. A kyle, in this context, refers to a small monastic or sacred enclosure, typically the ground immediately surrounding an early church or hermitage. Cross-slabs, flat stones carved with crosses that were common markers in early Irish Christianity, were found scattered at the location, and in 1946 the Office of Public Works constructed a low stone-walled enclosure on the island specifically to gather and protect them. The cross-base in question lies just outside this enclosure on the north-west side, at the foot of the steps to the stile, apparently overlooked or displaced from whatever arrangement was intended. It measures roughly 53 centimetres by 34 centimetres, and only 15 centimetres high, an unassuming lump of stone that would be easy to step over without a second thought.

The site sits within a small wooded area surrounded by marsh and rough meadow on a gentle north-facing slope. The combination of soft ground, island setting, and early medieval stonework gives the place a particular atmosphere, less managed monument than a layered accumulation of centuries, including a mid-twentieth-century intervention that itself is now ageing quietly into the landscape.

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Pete F
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