Cross-inscribed stone, An Baile Íochtarach, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed stone, An Baile Íochtarach, Co. Kerry

At Kildrum Graveyard on the northern side of the Dingle Peninsula, roughly three hundred small stones crowd the ground, most of them unnamed, their occupants unrecorded.

Among them are cross-slabs, a form of early medieval grave marker in which a cross is carved directly onto a flat stone rather than raised as a separate sculpted monument. One of these, known as cross-slab 1115, carries a simple Latin cross that rises to meet a deliberate notch cut into the top edge of the stone, so that the cross and the stone's own outline complete each other. It is a quietly precise piece of early stoneworking, and until relatively recently it had never been formally recorded.

The graveyard sits at around fifty metres above sea level on the lower slopes of Leathaoibh, with views south over Dingle Harbour and northeast towards Mount Brandon. A medieval church once stood here, and the oval enclosure associated with it was still legible on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1841, though no coherent above-ground remains of the church survive today. The clustering and density of the grave markers across the site are thought to reflect both the footprint of that lost church and the boundary of that earlier enclosure. In 2010, a graveyard survey carried out by Laurence Dunne identified twelve previously unrecorded cross-slabs within the old burial ground. Cross-slab 1115 was among the more distinctive finds: it shares its notched-top feature with at least one other slab on the site, number 1124, and the same characteristic has been noted on a third slab that is now missing entirely. Whether this represents a local workshop tradition, a shared patron, or simply a regional convention in early Christian stoneworking is not known, but the repetition is suggestive.

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