Cross-slab, Ballintine, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Ballintine, Co. Kildare

In a graveyard at Ballintine, Co. Kildare, five Early Christian cross-slabs survive together, a quiet concentration of early medieval stonework that is easy to overlook precisely because so little of it protrudes above the ground. One of these slabs sits earthfast, meaning it is set directly into the soil with only a fragment visible above the surface, its presence more suggested than declared.

The particular slab in question is a low fragment of reddish-brown conglomerate stone, standing just 0.38 metres high. Its rounded head, roughly 0.32 metres in diameter, carries a Greek cross on its eastern face. A Greek cross, unlike the Latin cross familiar from church architecture, has four arms of equal length, a form common in early Irish Christian carving. Only a short section of the shaft, 0.17 metres wide, breaks the ground surface. The graveyard that contains these five slabs also preserves the remains of an associated church site, suggesting this was once a functioning early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of small monastic or parish foundation that once dotted the Irish landscape and has since largely dissolved back into the earth.

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