Cross-inscribed stone, Garranes, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed stone, Garranes, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope at Garranes in Co. Kerry, a small stone slab rests on top of a boulder beside a spring.

Measuring just 35 by 25 centimetres, it carries a single incised cross, its shaft 20 centimetres long and its arms 12 centimetres across, cut there not by a mason or a monument-maker but by pilgrims. The well beneath it, Toberfeaghna, is triangular in shape, formed where two low stone slabs lean against the base of an upright boulder, and the spring water that gathers there runs downslope to the south-east. Gorse bushes and small holly trees have closed in around it, giving the whole arrangement a quality of enclosure that feels less like neglect than gradual absorption.

The well takes its name from St. Fiachna, and it sits within a cluster of early Christian remains that suggest this corner of Kerry was once a place of some religious significance. About 50 metres to the west stand the ruins of Temple Feaghna, the church of St. Fiachna, set within a subrectangular burial ground defined by an earthen bank that may originally have served as the enclosing boundary of a monastic settlement. Such enclosures, known in Irish ecclesiastical archaeology as ecclesiastical enclosures or monastic vallums, were used to demarcate sacred ground and separate the religious community from the surrounding landscape. Two bullaun stones also survive in the vicinity. A bullaun is a boulder or slab with one or more artificial cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface, associated in Ireland with early Christian sites and often believed to have curative or devotional properties. One lies roughly 20 metres to the south of the church ruin; a second, now built into a roadside fence about 50 metres to the north, is said locally to have originally stood within the graveyard itself.

The cross-inscribed slab on top of the Toberfeaghna boulder is easy to overlook, partly because of the encroaching vegetation and partly because it is not a formal monument in any conventional sense. It is the accumulated mark of repeated visits, a record of devotion pressed into stone by people whose names are entirely unknown.

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Pete F
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