Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
On the top of a dry-stone wall, turned face-down so that its carved surface is hidden from view, sits a small sandstone slab bearing the lower portion of an early Christian cross.
The reversal is not deliberate iconoclasm; it is simply how the stone ended up, incorporated into an enclosure wall where its decorated face is no longer visible. The carving itself is modest in scale, barely the size of a hardback book, but the detail recorded before it was set into the wall suggests something carefully made: a Latin cross rendered in low relief, only six millimetres proud of the surface, with rounded hollows cut into the angles where the arms meet the shaft, and the lower half of the stone stepping out a further three millimetres from the face of the cross, creating a subtle layered effect.
The slab sits within St. Berrihert's Kyle, an early ecclesiastical enclosure near Ardane in County Tipperary. Kyle, in this context, derives from the Irish word for a narrow wood or a secluded place, and the site has long been associated with St. Berrihert, an early medieval saint. The oval stone enclosure in which the slab is now incorporated was constructed in 1946 by the Office of Public Works and is stepped internally, giving it a neat, preserved appearance that belies the age of the material it contains. The cross-slab itself was catalogued as slab 30 by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe, writing in 1967, who recorded its dimensions and described the carving in careful detail at a time when the back of the stone was already obscured. It is a small fragment, likely the surviving lower section of a once-complete slab, of the kind commonly erected at early Irish monastic sites as grave markers or devotional objects.