Cross-slab, Behaghane, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Crosses & Monuments
On the lower slopes of Coad mountain, in a graveyard overlooking Cove Harbour and Kenmare Bay, stands a slab of stone that has been doing double duty for centuries.
Early medieval in character, it bears a broadly grooved Latin cross cut into its smooth western face, and it stands just under a metre tall. It has also, at some point in its long career, become a scratching post for the sheep that graze among the graves. There is something quietly levelling about that: a stone that once marked the edge of the sacred, now worn a little further by livestock with an itch.
The slab sits in the graveyard at Behaghane, six metres south of the south-east corner of Kilcrohane Church, also known as Coad Church and as Cill Chrócháin in Irish. The church was traditionally dedicated to St Cróchán, patron of the parish. Cross-inscribed slabs of this kind are a recurring feature of early Christian Ireland, simple upright stones carved with a single incised or grooved cross, often associated with church sites and burial grounds from roughly the sixth to twelfth centuries. The carving here is a single-line Latin cross, cut in a broad groove into the stone's face. By the time a graveyard survey was carried out in 2009 by Robert Hanbidge and Ann Frykler of Headland Archaeology Ltd., the cross was described as faint and heavily eroded, the combined work of centuries of weather and, presumably, considerable ovine attention.
The graveyard itself occupies a rectangular enclosure on the south-eastern slopes of Coad mountain, and the church sits near its northern boundary. The setting, looking south towards Kenmare Bay, gives some sense of why this particular patch of ground was chosen for a place of worship and burial. A photograph taken in 1946 by Caoimhín Ó Danachair, now held in the National Folklore Collection at UCD, documents the nearby holy well at Toberavilla and the associated pilgrimage route known as Turas Chrócháin, suggesting that this corner of the Iveragh Peninsula retained a living devotional geography well into the twentieth century. The cross-slab, weathered and grazed-upon, sits within that same landscape.