Cross-slab, Gowlanes, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Gowlanes, Co. Kerry

Near the summit of Eagles Hill in County Kerry, just below a pass called Windy Gap, there is a small slab of stone measuring roughly forty centimetres by twenty.

Carved into its face is an incised cross, and nestled into each of the four angles between the arms of that cross is a second, smaller cross. It is a quiet, compressed piece of early Christian stonework, easy to overlook beside the low cairn of slabs and quartz that sits nearby, yet it marks something that once drew people to this exposed hillside in considerable numbers.

The site is locally known as Tobar Na Bearnan, a holy well, and it served as the final station of the Kilcrohane turas. A turas is a structured pilgrimage circuit, typically involving prayers recited at a series of designated stops, often ancient stones, crosses, or wells, each visited in a prescribed order. The Kilcrohane turas was formerly held in late July or early August, the feast season associated with Lughnasa, a pre-Christian harvest festival that was absorbed into the Christian calendar across much of Ireland. The well at Eagles Hill was its culminating point, and its water was reputed to cure eye conditions, a belief recorded by Ó Súilleabháin in 1945. The cross-slab sits beside the well on the south-eastern side of the cairn, functioning as both a devotional marker and, in all likelihood, the formal terminal monument of the whole pilgrimage route.

The combination of elements here, the quartz cairn, the healing well, the inscribed stone, and the high, wind-exposed location, reflects a layering of belief and practice that is common across the Irish landscape but rarely so compactly arranged. Pilgrims completing a strenuous uphill walk would have arrived at this spot already prepared, physically and spiritually, for whatever the final prayers and the water of Tobar Na Bearnan were meant to accomplish.

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