Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary

A small stone slab sitting on top of a wall might not immediately demand attention, but this one carries the faint geometry of something much older.

Barely larger than a hardback book, it bears the parallel incised lines of a cross-shaft carved into its face, and a small knob projecting from its upper edge suggests it was once the lower half of a two-piece monument, designed to receive a second slab fitted on top. That missing upper section is gone, and the fragment left behind is easy to overlook, perched on the wall of an oval stone enclosure in the south-eastern corner of St. Berrihert's Kyle.

St. Berrihert's Kyle is an early ecclesiastical enclosure in Ardane, Co. Tipperary, associated with a saint whose cult left a cluster of early medieval carved stones at this site. The oval stone enclosure in which this slab now sits was built by the Office of Public Works in 1946, a mid-twentieth century intervention intended to gather and protect the carved stones found at the site. The enclosure is stepped internally, giving the arrangement something of a formal, almost theatrical quality. Curiously, this particular slab appears to have gone unnoticed in the detailed survey published by Ó hÉailidhe in 1967, which otherwise documented the carved stones at St. Berrihert's Kyle at some length. Whether it was genuinely overlooked or simply considered too fragmentary to warrant inclusion is unclear, but the omission means it sits outside the main scholarly record for the site.

The slab itself is modest in scale, measuring 0.23 metres by 0.11 metres with a thickness of just 0.06 metres. The knob at the top rises only 0.05 metres above the surface. These are small dimensions for an object with potentially significant age, and the wear and simplicity of the carving make it difficult to date with any precision from the details alone. What is clear is that it was never a standalone object; it was always meant to connect to something else, and whatever that something was has long since disappeared.

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