Leacht, An Chathair Bhearnach, Co. Kerry

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Holy Sites & Wells

Leacht, An Chathair Bhearnach, Co. Kerry

At the site known as An Chathair Bhearnach on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a small carved stone slab survives that is easy to overlook and difficult to date, yet carries a remarkably precise piece of early Christian decoration.

A leacht, in the early Irish ecclesiastical tradition, is a low cairn or platform of stones associated with a saint or holy person, often used as a focus for prayer or commemoration rather than formal burial. This one retains its cross-slab intact enough to read, though only just.

The slab itself is modest in scale, measuring 61 centimetres tall, 22 centimetres wide, and just 8 centimetres thick, tapering toward a roughly pointed base in the manner typical of early medieval Irish stone carving. Its upper end is broken, but what remains is enough to identify a portion of an encircled, equal-armed cross with trifid terminals, meaning the arms of the cross end in three-pronged or clover-like forms, a decorative motif found across early Christian stonework in Ireland. Close to the western side of this leacht, a second row of upright slabs runs roughly 2.4 metres north to south, and may represent the kerbing or edge of a second leacht, though this identification remains tentative. The site is recorded in A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan's archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula, published by Cork University Press in 1996, which brought together a considerable body of field evidence from this part of south Kerry, a region unusually dense with early medieval remains.

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