Cross-inscribed stone, Glebe, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed stone, Glebe, Co. Kerry

In a field on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, three rough slabs lie in front of a small stone-built well enclosure, each one marked with incised crosses cut directly into the rock.

These are not polished monuments or carefully composed inscriptions; they are functional objects of devotion, worn and uneven, the kind of thing that can be easy to walk past without quite registering what you are looking at.

The well is known as Tobergobnet, or Tobar Ghobnaite in Irish, and it sits along the line of an old trackway roughly 200 metres south-east of Killinane Church and graveyard. The well itself is sheltered within a drystone-built structure, a type of simple corbelled or lintelled enclosure built into the slope of the ground, which is a common form of protection for holy wells across Ireland. The name Gobnat connects the site to Saint Gobnat, an early Irish saint particularly venerated in Cork and Kerry, whose feast day falls on the 11th of February. The cross-incised slabs placed before the well entrance are a familiar feature of such sites, serving as focal points for prayer during the pattern, the traditional communal gathering at a holy well or sacred site on a saint's feast day or other fixed date. At Tobergobnet, the pattern was held on the 3rd of March, a date that sits close to but does not exactly match the more widely observed Gobnat feast day, which may suggest local variation or a secondary dedication. The slabs themselves are rough rather than refined, incised rather than carved in relief, placing them in a long tradition of votive stone-marking that predates and outlasts any single period of Irish Christianity.

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