Cross-slab, Baile An Bhaoithín, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Baile An Bhaoithín, Co. Kerry

At Calluragh burial ground on the Dingle Peninsula, a stone slab sits with most of its shaft buried underground, presenting to the world a face that is almost perfectly circular.

The visible portion measures roughly 0.9 metres high by 0.78 metres wide, and both sides carry the same carefully worked design: a Maltese cross enclosed within a circle, with a second circle traced just a few centimetres beyond the first. At the centre of each cross there is a shallow hole, drilled or pecked into the stone but never pushed all the way through. That detail, the near-perforation that stops just short of breaking the surface, gives the slab an oddly deliberate quality, as though the carver paused at a threshold and chose not to cross it.

The slab sits within the early Christian settlement known as Calluragh, or An Raingiléis, now a designated National Monument. The site occupies a steep south-east facing slope of Croaghmarhin, and the settlement as a whole belongs to the pattern of small monastic and devotional enclosures that were established across the Corca Dhuibhne, the Dingle Peninsula, during the early Christian period in Ireland, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. Cross-slabs of this type, upright stones incised with a cross design, were a common form of early Christian marker in Ireland, used to sanctify ground, commemorate the dead, or simply assert the Christian character of a place. The double-circle framing and the Maltese cross form here are consistent with decorative conventions found elsewhere in Kerry and across the western seaboard. The site and its cross-slab were recorded and described in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Dingle Peninsula, which remains a foundational reference for the region's early medieval remains.

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