Cross-inscribed stone (present location), Baile An Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-inscribed stone (present location), Baile An Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry

A small triangular slab, barely 44 centimetres at its widest point, has accumulated a surprisingly complicated history for something so modest in size.

One face carries an equal-armed cross with expanded terminals and a small oval depression near the apex. Turn it over and the carving becomes considerably more ambitious: an equal-armed cross with scrolled terminals, small dots filling the angles between the arms and the circular spaces defined by the scrolls, the whole composition enclosed within a triangular frame whose lower angles each contain an inscribed circle with a central dot, and whose upper angle holds a miniature cross of its own. Where the sides of the triangle nearly meet at the top, they curl outward instead to form a penannular circle, an open ring, with a central dot. It is a piece of early medieval stonework that repays close attention.

The stone's origins are tangled. Its earliest recorded location was within a cashel, a type of stone-walled early medieval enclosure, situated just outside the north-west corner of Páirc na Croise in what is now the townland of Kilvickadownig on the Dingle Peninsula. Writing in 1912, H. S. Crawford noted that it had by then been removed to Adare Manor in County Limerick, and he catalogued it under the same reference number as a missing slab from Páirc na Croise, apparently treating the two as connected. Whether that association was justified remains unclear. The stone eventually passed into the collections of the National Museum of Ireland, and for a period it was listed under Kilvickadownig in the Sites and Monuments Record. It is now held at Músaem Chorca Dhuibhne in Ballyferriter, where it has been assigned a separate monument number reflecting its present location rather than wherever it may originally have stood.

Visitors to Músaem Chorca Dhuibhne, the local museum serving the Corca Dhuibhne or West Kerry Gaeltacht region, have the opportunity to see the slab in person. Given the stone's dimensions, it is easy to overlook among larger objects, but the elaborate carving on its reverse face is worth examining slowly.

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