Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

A small fragment of grey sandstone, barely wider than a hand-span, sits on top of a wall in south Tipperary and carries on its face the lower portion of a cross, so lightly worked into the surface that it is almost more suggestion than carving.

The technique is pocking, a method of pecking at stone to produce a shallow, textured mark rather than a clean incised line, and here it has been applied with a particularly restrained touch. The reverse of the slab is entirely blank.

The stone sits within St. Berrihert's Kyle, an early ecclesiastical enclosure near Ardane that preserves a remarkable concentration of early medieval carved slabs. The Kyle takes its name from St. Berrihert, an obscure but locally venerated saint associated with this part of Tipperary. In 1946, the Office of Public Works constructed an oval stone enclosure, stepped on the inside, to gather and protect many of these slabs, and this particular piece, catalogued as slab 72 by the scholar Ó hÉailidhe in 1967, was placed on top of the enclosure wall within the southern sector of the site. Its dimensions are modest, roughly 38 centimetres by 28 centimetres and only 6 centimetres thick, which makes it easy to overlook among the larger, more elaborately decorated slabs nearby. What survives is only the lower section of the cross design, leaving open the question of what the full composition once looked like.

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