Cross-slab, Killogrone, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Killogrone, Co. Kerry

In County Kerry there is a carved stone slab that nobody can currently find.

It is not lost in the dramatic sense of having vanished from a shipwreck or a sealed vault; it has simply slipped out of the record, its present location unknown. What survives is a pair of nineteenth-century descriptions precise enough to make the absence all the more frustrating.

The slab once stood on a leacht at Killogrone, a leacht being a low, roughly rectangular cairn or platform associated with early Christian devotion, often marking a site of prayer or commemoration. It was positioned close to an ogham stone, ogham being the early medieval Irish script in which letters are encoded as notches and strokes cut along a stone's edge. Writing in 1872, a scholar named Graves described the slab as bearing an elaborate cross and a dove engraved upon it in a very peculiar manner, a phrase that raises more questions than it answers. What made the engraving peculiar is unrecorded. A few years later, in 1879, Brash added the one hard measurement that survives: the stone stood three feet, roughly 0.91 metres, high. That is modest in scale, the kind of object that could be moved, repurposed, built into a wall, or simply forgotten during a field clearance. Beyond those two brief notices, there is nothing more to go on.

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