Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Among the carved stones gathered at St. Berrihert's Kyle in County Tipperary, one small slab does not announce itself easily.

Catalogued as slab 67, it measures just 36 centimetres by 24 centimetres, cut from coarse grey sandstone, and the Latin cross it bears is incised to a depth of only two millimetres. That near-invisible relief, described by scholar Pádraig Ó hÉailidhe as "graded outwards," means the cross is best appreciated by raking light rather than direct scrutiny. Easy to overlook, difficult to forget once seen.

The slab sits on an internal ledge in the north-east sector of an oval stone enclosure, itself built by the Office of Public Works in 1946 to house and protect the collection of early Christian carved stones at this site. St. Berrihert's Kyle is an ecclesiastical enclosure in the southern part of the Ardane townland, a place long associated with the early Irish saint Berrihert. The Kyle, a word used in Irish contexts to denote a small wood or enclosed sacred space, has accumulated a significant grouping of cross-slabs, the kind of simply incised early medieval stones that once marked graves or defined sacred ground across Ireland. The 1946 OPW enclosure, stepped internally to display the stones at different levels, was a deliberate act of preservation at a moment when many such collections were poorly protected or dispersed.

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