Cross-slab, An Riasc, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Crosses & Monuments
A carved stone pulled from a river sometime before 1912 now sits in a university corridor in Cork, far removed from the early Christian site it once marked on the Dingle Peninsula.
The slab in question was recovered near Reask, an important early medieval monastic enclosure about 1.25 kilometres east of Ballyferriter in County Kerry, on a stretch of high ground with open views north across Smerwick Harbour. How it ended up in a river, and for how long it lay there, is not recorded.
The stone itself is 87 centimetres tall, cut from local grey sandstone and roughly shaped with a rounded top. Both faces carry carved crosses, though they differ from one another in telling ways. On the front, a Latin cross has scrolled terminals at its head and arms, a decorative flourish common in early Christian stonework, and two smaller crosslets flank the upper portion, with circles and a saltire, an X-shaped cross, filling the angles between them. The back face is comparatively restrained, carrying a single Latin cross with expanded, slightly splayed terminals. This double-faced quality, two distinct compositions on a single portable slab, makes it an unusually considered object. It was found during the nineteenth century and transferred to University College Cork, where it is now displayed among ogham stones and other carved pieces in the stone corridor. Ogham is the early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, and many such pieces were gathered into institutional collections during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sometimes at the cost of their original context.
Visitors to UCC can see the stone as part of the corridor collection on campus. The site at Reask itself, the early Christian enclosure from which the stone originates, remains on the Dingle Peninsula, and the Calluragh burial ground associated with the wider monument complex sits at the highest point of the townland nearby.