Cross-inscribed stone, Fán, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed stone, Fán, Co. Kerry

At a place called Fán on the Dingle Peninsula, two stones carry between them six incised crosses, most of them cut with expanded terminals, a style sometimes called a cross pattée, in which the arms flare outward at their ends.

The crosses are modest in scale but deliberate in execution, and their presence here, alongside the remains of an early stone settlement, suggests a site that was once part of an organised, if now largely obscured, early Christian landscape.

The stones sit near a structure recorded as Clochán Bhóthar an Trasnaigh, a circular clochaun, which is a drystone beehive-shaped hut of the kind associated with early monastic or farming life in the west of Ireland. Beneath or alongside the clochaun lies a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically built for storage or refuge, though this one is described as inaccessible. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister noted the cross-inscribed stones as far back as 1899, recording three crosses on each. The broader survey context comes from Judith Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a thorough and still-consulted catalogue of the Dingle Peninsula's extraordinary concentration of early medieval remains. The area around Ballyferriter and Fán was densely settled in the early Christian period, and finds like these are less rare here than almost anywhere else in Ireland, yet each cluster of carved stones and collapsed stone cells carries its own quiet specificity.

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