Cross-inscribed stone, Carrigaha, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed stone, Carrigaha, Co. Kerry

Standing in open pastureland at Carrigaha on the Dingle Peninsula, this stone has been marked by hands from more than one era, and the question of whose hands, and when, is part of what makes it quietly interesting.

The stone itself is a standing stone, meaning it was set upright in the ground in prehistory, most likely during the Bronze Age, as a marker or monument whose original purpose is now lost. What survives is a substantial slab, nearly two metres tall and over a metre wide at its base, tapering noticeably toward the top and thinning considerably in profile. It is oriented roughly east-northeast to west-southwest, and sits in ground open enough to offer clear views in every direction.

The carvings on its two faces introduce a layer of ambiguity. On the western side, a lightly incised cross sits inside a roughly drawn, irregular oval, with three smaller crosses below it. On the eastern face, someone has cut the initial letter D alongside another small cross. The execution is uneven and informal throughout, and the possibility raised by J. Cuppage's 1986 survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region is that these markings may be of fairly recent origin rather than early medieval. That matters because cross-inscribed stones on the Dingle Peninsula are often associated with early Christian activity, when existing prehistoric monuments were sometimes reused or marked with a cross as a way of Christianising the landscape. If these particular carvings are more recent, they belong instead to a folk tradition of marking stones with religious symbols, or perhaps to something more personal, a name initial and a small devotional sign left by an individual at some point in the last few centuries. The stone itself predates any of this by a very long margin.

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