Cross-slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Set into the interior east wall of St Peakaun's church at Toureen is a small inscribed stone that is easy to overlook, partly because of its modest size and partly because its surface tells two stories at different levels.

The slab measures roughly thirty centimetres tall and just under forty centimetres wide, and its face is not flat in the way you might expect of a deliberately worked stone. Ancient spalling, the flaking away of the surface over time, has left the upper portion recessed relative to the lower, so the stone presents itself in two distinct planes. A linear cross with expanded terminals occupies the lower, raised area, while a single complete horizontal line of text runs across the recessed upper section. The missing bottom-left corner gives the whole thing an irregular, slightly battered outline, and yet the carving that remains is precise enough to have attracted serious scholarly attention.

The stone was not known to the wider world until an excavation in 1944, carried out by Duignan, brought it to light. It was subsequently catalogued by Macalister in 1949, and later described in detail by Okasha and Forsyth in their 2001 study of early medieval inscriptions, where it appears as Toureen Peacaun 10. The split-level surface is particularly noted by those scholars as an unusual feature, since the ancient spalling appears to predate the inscriptions, meaning whoever carved the text and the cross was already working with a damaged and uneven stone. That detail, small as it seems, raises quiet questions about how and why such a compromised piece of material came to be chosen for what was clearly a considered act of marking.

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