Cross-slab, Ardane, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Crosses & Monuments
Among the many early Christian cross-slabs scattered across Ireland, few sit in quite so carefully curated a setting as this modest piece of red sandstone at Ardane in County Tipperary.
Measuring roughly 46 centimetres by 14 centimetres, it carries a Latin cross cut in shallow relief, only 7 millimetres proud of the surface, with squared hollows set into each of the four angles between the arms. It is a small, quietly precise object, the kind of thing that rewards close looking rather than distance.
The slab sits within St. Berrihert's Kyle, an ecclesiastical enclosure associated with an early Irish saint, where it rests on an internal ledge in the eastern sector. The enclosure itself was given its present oval stone boundary, stepped on the inside, by the Office of Public Works in 1946, a mid-twentieth-century act of preservation that now frames what are almost certainly medieval or early medieval remains. The cross-slab was catalogued and described by Ó hÉailidhe in 1967, who numbered it slab 11 among a group of stones on the site; at the time of recording, the thickness and reverse face were not accessible for examination. The use of red sandstone is notable, as it is a locally available material in parts of Tipperary and gives the slab a warm, distinctive colouration that sets it apart from the greyer stones more commonly associated with early Irish ecclesiastical sites.