Cross-inscribed pillar, Leataoibh Mór, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed pillar, Leataoibh Mór, Co. Kerry

At a site called Templenacloonagh, or Teampall na Cluanach, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, three carved stones stand or lie within a sub-rectangular enclosure on a slope facing Smerwick Harbour.

Two of them are tall pillars, and between them they carry no fewer than six distinct cross designs, each one different. That degree of variation on a single cluster of stones is unusual even by the standards of early medieval Kerry, a region not short of carved stonework.

The southern pillar, standing 1.58 metres high, bears a triple-barred cross on its western face, its design elaborated with bifurcated terminals, meaning the arms split at their tips like small forks, and an outline lozenge at the crossing of the shaft and upper bar. A smaller plain cross appears near the base of the same face. The northern pillar, slightly shorter at 1.52 metres and broken at the top, carries a Latin cross on its eastern face and, on the western face, a vertical sequence of four crosses stacked one above the other, including one with a suspended circle containing an equal-armed cross, another with a scrolled terminal at the base of its shaft, and a fourth whose stem has sunk partly into the ground. A third stone, an oblong boulder, carries a roughly equal-armed cross with T-bar terminals on one of its faces. The variety of terminal types, lozenges, triangles, bifurcations, scrolls, expanded ends, suggests these stones were not produced to a single template but accumulated over time or reflect different hands at work within the same enclosure. The enclosure itself also contains the remains of an oratory, a second building that may be a church, and two possible hut sites, all consistent with a small early Christian monastic settlement. The survey description of this site was published by J. Cuppage in the 1986 Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey.

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