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.

Headstones, notched grave markers, and cross-slabs are scattered across the interior in a density and arrangement that quietly maps the footprint of a medieval church that is otherwise entirely gone above ground. No coherent masonry survives, no wall, no arch, yet the stones themselves seem to remember where the building stood.

When surveyor Laurence Dunne carried out a graveyard survey of the site in 2010, he recorded twelve cross-slabs that had not previously been documented. One of them, designated cross-slab No. 92, sits near the eastern edge of the old burial ground. It is a triangular piece of sandstone, measuring 0.54 metres by 0.32 metres, and just 0.09 metres thick, with a wide incised plain Latin cross cut into its face. A cross-slab of this kind is essentially a flat stone, sometimes a grave marker and sometimes a boundary or devotional marker, bearing a cross that was carved rather than built up in relief. The Latin cross form, with its longer lower arm, is among the most common types found at early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites. The graveyard itself sits at around 50 metres above sea level on the lower slopes of Leathaoibh, with views south over Dingle Harbour and northeast towards Mount Brandon. The oval enclosure once associated with the site was still legible on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1841, though it has since disappeared from the landscape.

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