Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Among the dozens of carved stones gathered at St. Berrihert's Kyle in County Tipperary, one small red sandstone slab sits quietly on an internal ledge in the northern sector of the enclosure.

It measures less than half a metre in length and is barely a finger's width thick, yet cut into its face is a Maltese cross, a form whose equal, splayed arms carry a geometry associated with early medieval Christian carving across Ireland. The decoration is described as outlined and lightly pocked, meaning the design was worked by a series of small, shallow strikes rather than deep incision, and there is a subtle detail worth noting: the lower sides of the horizontal arms extend across the bottom member of the cross, giving the whole design a slightly connected, bracketed quality. The back of the slab remains unseen, set against the ledge.

St. Berrihert's Kyle is an ecclesiastical enclosure, a type of bounded sacred space associated with an early Irish saint and their community, which in this case carries the name of St. Berrihert. The site holds a collection of early cross-slabs, and in 1946 the Office of Public Works constructed an oval stone enclosure on the southern sector of the site, stepped internally, to gather and protect the stones. The slab in question, catalogued as slab 38 by scholar Ó hÉailidhe in a 1967 study, predates that structure by a considerable stretch. Its modest dimensions, roughly 48 centimetres by 16 centimetres, are typical of the portable or semi-portable votive slabs found across early Irish ecclesiastical sites, objects that blur the line between gravemarker, devotional object, and boundary stone.

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