Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
A small slab of red sandstone, barely twenty centimetres across, sits on top of a wall in the eastern sector of an ancient ecclesiastical enclosure in County Tipperary.
It is easy to overlook, and that is partly the point. Carved into its face, in relief so shallow it barely clears the surface by three millimetres, is the lower portion of a Latin cross. The back of the slab is not visible, set as it is against the wall, so whatever else it might once have shown remains unknown.
The enclosure is known as St. Berrihert's Kyle, a site of early Christian significance in the Glen of Aherlow. The word "kyle" derives from the Irish "coill", meaning a wood or secluded place, and the name points to the kind of quiet, set-apart character that early monastic communities often sought. The cross-slab itself, catalogued as slab 57 by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe in 1967, belongs to a tradition of incised and relief-carved slabs that mark early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites. The oval stone enclosure within which it now sits, stepped internally, was built by the Office of Public Works in 1946, giving the arrangement a layered quality: a twentieth-century structure designed to contain and protect fragments of something far older. The slab's modest dimensions, roughly the size of a large hardback book, make it a quietly odd thing to find resting on a wall rather than displayed or set into the ground.