Cross, An Baile Íochtarach, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross, An Baile Íochtarach, Co. Kerry

Among the roughly three hundred grave markers crowding Kildrum Graveyard on the northern side of the Dingle Peninsula, one small slab quietly complicates any easy reading of the site.

Cross-slab no. 1121 is anthropomorphic, meaning it has been shaped to suggest a human figure, with roughly worked rounded arms and a distinct head carved from local green sandstone. The whole piece measures just 56 centimetres tall, 47 centimetres wide, and 5 centimetres thick, yet its form places it in a tradition of early medieval stone-cutting that predates the neat rows and legible inscriptions most people associate with old graveyards. Most of the other markers here are unnamed, notched, or otherwise unreadable in the conventional sense, so the cumulative effect of the place is less a record of individuals than a kind of dense, anonymous field of the dead.

The graveyard sits on an elevated position at around 50 metres above sea level on the lower slopes of Leathaoibh, with views south over Dingle Harbour and northeast towards Mount Brandon. A survey carried out by Laurence Dunne in 2010 noted that the spatial clustering of the grave markers almost certainly reflects the footprint of a medieval church that once stood within the enclosure, the oval outline of which was still visible on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1841. No coherent above-ground remains of that church survive today. The density and arrangement of the stones, read alongside that lost oval boundary, suggest a site with a long, layered history of use stretching back well into the early medieval period, even if the physical evidence is now fragmentary and mostly below the surface.

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