Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

A small slab of grey sandstone, barely half a metre long, sits on top of a wall in the western sector of an ancient ecclesiastical site in County Tipperary.

What makes it quietly remarkable is that both of its faces are carved: one side bears a Latin cross in low relief, its angles softened by double-rounded hollows, and the other carries an irregular Latin cross with triple-rounded hollows in the angles. A raised circular boss, roughly the size of a large coin, protrudes from the top of the stone. The edges have been worked smooth by a technique known as pocking, a process of repeated percussion that leaves a roughened but even surface, though here the result is deliberately unstraight, giving the slab an organic, handmade quality.

The slab belongs to St. Berrihert's Kyle, a site long associated with an early medieval saint and surrounded by an ecclesiastical enclosure that retains a strong sense of its original form. The stone itself is catalogued as slab 18A/18B, a designation reflecting the fact that its two carved faces were treated as distinct subjects by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe, writing in 1967. The oval stone enclosure in which the slab now sits was constructed by the Office of Public Works in 1946, a mid-twentieth-century effort to gather and protect the early carved stones associated with the site. That intervention means the present arrangement is partly a modern curation rather than a survival in its original context, though the stones themselves, including this one, are genuine early Christian material. The dimensions are modest, 0.47 metres by 0.21 metres, with a thickness of just 0.08 metres, making it closer in size to a large book than to the monumental high crosses more commonly associated with Irish ecclesiastical art.

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