Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
A small slab of red sandstone, barely the size of a large book, sits on top of a wall in the northern sector of an ancient enclosure in County Tipperary.
What makes it worth a second look is what has been worked into both of its faces: on one side, a single-line cross lightly pocked into the surface; on the other, an outlined cross with rounded hollows carved into each of its angles. Two crosses on one stone, each treated differently, suggesting the slab was considered worth marking twice.
The slab sits within St. Berrihert's Kyle, an ecclesiastical enclosure near Ardane that preserves an unusually dense concentration of early medieval carved stones. The word "kyle" derives from the Irish "coill", meaning a wood or sacred grove, and the site carries a strong association with St. Berrihert, an early Christian figure of the Glengarriff area. The oval stone enclosure in which these slabs are now gathered was built by the Office of Public Works in 1946, apparently to protect and organise the collection. This particular slab, catalogued by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe in 1967 as slab 22A/22B, measures roughly 38 centimetres by 24 centimetres, with a thickness of just over six centimetres. It is a modest object by any measure, yet the decision to carve it on both faces points to a deliberate, considered act of marking, whether devotional, commemorative, or something else entirely that has not survived in the record.