Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Among the many cross-slabs at St. Berrihert's Kyle in County Tipperary, one small piece of red sandstone stands slightly apart, literally loose from its setting, its blank reverse face now visible to anyone who cares to look.

It measures just 33 centimetres by 19, roughly the size of a hardback book, and carries a single outlined Latin cross, lightly incised into the surface. The simplicity of the carving, a cross defined by its incised outline rather than any sculptural relief, is characteristic of early medieval Irish stone work, and there is something quietly affecting about how little effort it takes to hold the whole object in your gaze.

The slab sits on an internal ledge in the northern sector of the ecclesiastical enclosure known as St. Berrihert's Kyle, a site associated with an early Irish saint and enclosed by an oval stone boundary. That enclosure, stepped internally, was constructed by the Office of Public Works in 1946, giving a degree of formal order to what is otherwise an ancient and organically accumulated sacred landscape. The slab itself is recorded by scholar Ó hÉailidhe, who catalogued it as slab 49 in a 1967 study of the site's collection of carved stones. Whether the stone was always positioned as it is now, or has shifted over the centuries, is not recorded, but the fact that its back is plainly blank confirms it was worked on one face only, a common enough practice but one that the loosened stone has made unusually easy to verify.

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