Cross, Sceilg Mhichíl, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Sceilg Mhichíl, Co. Kerry

Skellig Michael is already an extraordinary place, a vertiginous rock eight miles off the Kerry coast bearing a near-intact early medieval monastery, yet even within that site there are quieter losses.

One of them is a small stone cross that stood in the Monks' Graveyard and has since disappeared entirely. No fragment, no stump, nothing remaining at ground level.

When A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan surveyed the Iveragh Peninsula in 1996, the cross was still present and measurable. It was a modest object, just 0.68 metres tall, 0.4 metres wide, and only 0.04 metres thick, so roughly the dimensions of a large roof slate. Its distinguishing features were short arms and hollowed angles, the concave scooping at the four inner junctions of the arms that appears on a number of early Irish crosses and gives them a slightly skeletal, windswept look. It stood in the monastic graveyard, a burial ground associated with the community of monks who occupied the island from probably the sixth or seventh century until sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth. At some point after 1996, it vanished. Whether it fell, was removed for conservation, or simply disintegrated is not recorded. What survives is a drawing, published in that 1996 survey, which now serves as the main evidence the cross existed at all.

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