Cross-slab, Ballinclare, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ballinclare, Co. Kerry

A small upright stone slab, less than a metre tall, marks a spot where three Kerry townlands meet and where a well has long since run dry.

The slab carries a plain Latin cross carved in relief on its east face, and the site's Irish name, Tobar na Croise, the well of the cross, suggests that the cross and the water were once understood as a single, inseparable thing. Now only the stone remains.

The site sits precisely at the junction of Ballinclare, Farrannacarriga, and Gurteen on the Dingle Peninsula, that boundary position perhaps no accident in a landscape where liminal spots, edges between territories, between the human and something older, tended to attract devotional attention. The slab stands over the hollow where the well once was, measuring 0.88 metres high and 0.31 metres wide. It was formerly the focus of a turas, a devotional circuit in which pilgrims would walk a prescribed route around a holy site, often pausing at specific stations to pray. According to a 1939 source cited by the folklorist and writer known as An Seabhac, the turas here was observed on the 27th of August each year. That date has passed unmarked for some time now, the well dry, the custom lapsed, the stone quietly outlasting both.

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