Cross-slab, An Baile Dubh, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, An Baile Dubh, Co. Kerry

On a hillside in the townland of Liscarney, overlooking Brandon Bay, a small flat stone lies loose on the ground beside a shallow depression that was once a holy well.

The stone, measuring roughly half a metre by a third of a metre and barely six centimetres thick, carries on one face a simple incised Latin cross with T-bar terminals at the head and each arm. It is an understated object, easily missed, yet it was once the focal point of a well-established pattern of devotion.

The well beside it was known as Tobar Niocláis, dedicated to St Nicholas, patron saint of Ballyduff Parish. Each year on his feast day, the 6th of December, large numbers of people gathered here to perform a turas, a devotional circuit in which pilgrims walked three times around the entire field, which bears the Irish name Páirc an Turasa, the field of the journey. The cross-slab originally stood upright some 2.7 metres west of the well, as recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for Ballyduff. A tradition collected from Ballyduff School, preserved in the Schools' Collection, describes the stone as placed on a small mound overlooking the well site, and includes a hand-drawn sketch made by a local contributor. The well itself no longer holds water; drainage work diverted it, and it now re-emerges roughly a hundred metres downslope to the north, leaving only that shallow depression to mark where it once issued. The cross-slab, no longer upright, lies on the surface where the old devotional landscape it once anchored has quietly come apart around it.

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