Cross-slab (present location), Nenagh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab (present location), Nenagh, Co. Tipperary

A former county jail that later became a convent school is now the unlikely home of a small but absorbing collection of early medieval stonework.

Nenagh Heritage Centre, on the west side of O'Rahilly Street, holds four cross-slabs and a number of quern stones, all originating from St. Odhran's Monastery at Latteragh. The cross-slabs are carved with incised crosses enclosed by single or double incised circles, a decorative convention associated with early Irish monastic grave markers. Downstairs, seven quern stones, two of them decorated, share space with a mortar labelled as a fifteenth-century monastic bowl and a broken stone ring.

The slabs arrived in Nenagh by a circuitous route. Three of them came to light in 1977 during the digging of a grave in the O'Brien family plot at Latteragh Graveyard, to the north of the north wall of Latteragh Church. A fourth was found separately, during work on the nearby Berkery family plot. All four are cut from a dense, fine-grained stone. The slab catalogued as Latteragh 3 by the scholar Dorothy Kelly, whose detailed analysis appeared in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1988, is a compact rectangular piece measuring 38 centimetres by 26 centimetres and just 5 centimetres thick. Its decoration takes the form of an equal-armed linear cross with slightly expanded terminals, the whole design contained within a double-lined incised circle. Kelly's study covers all four slabs and remains the principal published account of them.

The collection is accessible at the Heritage Centre on O'Rahilly Street, where the cross-slabs are on display. The quern stones and associated objects are kept in the basement. For anyone with an interest in early Irish monasticism, the context is worth bearing in mind: these objects were effectively buried beneath a working graveyard, still in use by local families, for an unknown period before they surfaced under a gravedigger's spade.

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