Cross-slab, Caherlehillan, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Caherlehillan, Co. Kerry

At an early medieval site in County Kerry, a broad stone slab stands on the western side of a corner-post shrine, carved with imagery that repays close attention.

The slab, standing 0.75 metres high, presents an encircled Maltese cross from which a grooved stem descends. That stem is not merely decorative; it represents a flabellum, a liturgical fan used in early Christian ceremony to keep insects from the Eucharist, and here rendered in stone with two lozenge-shaped expansions along its length and a triangular terminal at its base. Above the cross, a stylised bird has been worked into the surface in profile, and below the cross sits a pair of curvilinear motifs that may depict the ribbons sometimes shown attached to actual flabella. The whole composition is dense with symbolic intent.

The slab is one of two cross-inscribed stones positioned on the western face of the shrine at Caherlehillan, a site that belongs to the broader tradition of early Irish ecclesiastical enclosures found across the Iveragh Peninsula. A corner-post shrine of this kind is a small stone reliquary or grave monument, assembled from upright corner stones with flat slabs between them, a form associated with the veneration of saints or significant individuals in the early medieval church. The imagery on this particular slab, especially the flabellum motif, connects it to a wider network of early Christian iconographic practice documented by O'Sullivan and Sheehan in their 1996 survey of the region. The bird above the cross introduces a further layer of meaning, birds appearing regularly in early Irish religious art as symbols associated with the soul or with spiritual presence, though the carver here worked in a deliberately compressed, stylised manner rather than naturalistic representation.

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