Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
One of the stranger details about a small grey sandstone slab at St. Berrihert's Kyle in Ardane is the note, recorded matter-of-factly in the scholarly literature, that one arm of its carved cross was cut off by an incised line described as "probably a mistake".
It is a quietly human detail: an early medieval carver miscutting a line, and the error surviving intact for perhaps over a thousand years, preserved on a fragment of stone barely forty centimetres tall.
St. Berrihert's Kyle is an ecclesiastical enclosure, a type of site associated with an early Irish saint and typically bounded by a curving or oval perimeter that reflects the original sacred territory. The slab in question sits in the southern sector of the enclosure, resting on top of a low wall. The wall itself is part of an oval stone enclosure, stepped internally, that was constructed by the Office of Public Works in 1946, presumably to protect and display the collection of early carved stones gathered there. The slab, classified by scholar Ó hÉailidhe in 1967 as slab 3A/3B, carries decoration on both faces. The front bears a ringed cross in low relief, a form in which a circle connects the arms of the cross, with rounded hollows carved into the angles between the arms and short detached border fragments at each upper corner. The reverse carries a plainer outlined Latin cross, also with small rounded hollows at the angles, though a flake of stone is missing along the bottom edge. The piece is composed of grey sandstone and is modest in scale, roughly the size of a large hardback book and only eight centimetres thick.
The site sits within the Glen of Aherlow area of County Tipperary. The collection of cross-slabs at St. Berrihert's Kyle is understood to be one of the more significant groupings of early medieval carved stones in Munster, and the 1946 enclosure means the slabs are arranged in a way that allows reasonably close inspection. The particular slab described here sits on the enclosure wall rather than inside it, which makes it somewhat easier to examine from both sides.