Cross-slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Built into the east wall of a church at Toureen in County Tipperary, there is a fragment of carved stone that rewards close attention precisely because so much of it is missing.

It measures only about seventeen centimetres high and half a metre wide, with barely five centimetres of its thickness visible above the surrounding masonry. What you can see is just enough to identify a cross, but the cross itself is odd: its lower arm widens into a rectangular base or expansion, and a short cross-arm juts out at an unexpected angle. The outline was incised into the stone so that the cross stands proud of the surface in what is called false relief, a technique in which the background is cut away to leave the design raised, rather than carving the form itself in three dimensions. The rest of the slab, and whatever inscription or imagery it may once have carried, remains either lost or hidden behind the wall.

The fragment came to light during an excavation in 1944, documented by Duignan and subsequently noted by Macalister in 1949. It belongs to a group of carved stones associated with Toureen Peacaun, a site with early medieval ecclesiastical connections in this part of Tipperary. Scholars Okasha and Forsyth, writing in 2001, catalogued it as Toureen Peacaun 26 and were careful to describe it as part of a slab of unknown form, a phrase that quietly acknowledges how much remains unresolved. The unusual geometry of the cross, with that squared-off lower expansion and abbreviated arm, does not conform neatly to the more familiar ring-headed or simple Latin cross types found elsewhere across Ireland, which is part of what makes even this small, partially obscured piece worth pausing over.

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