Cross-slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Toureen, Co. Tipperary

Set into the interior east wall of St Peakaun's church in Toureen, County Tipperary, is a stone so small it could easily be mistaken for ordinary rubble.

It measures roughly twenty centimetres high and forty-one centimetres wide, little bigger than a large hardback book. What makes it worth a second look is what has been cut into its face: an equal-armed cross, drawn in outline rather than relief, alongside a line of text running horizontally across the stone. Cross-slabs of this kind, flat stones incised with early Christian imagery and sometimes inscription, are among the more understated survivors of early medieval Ireland, objects that were clearly made with intention but whose full context has often slipped away.

The stone is catalogued as Toureen Peacaun 2, a designation assigned by scholars Elisabeth Okasha and Katherine Forsyth in their 2001 study of inscribed stones from early Christian Ireland. Their description notes it as an apparently complete rectangular slab, which is itself worth remarking upon; many comparable pieces survive only as fragments. The incised text, running in a single horizontal line, has not been elaborated upon in available descriptions beyond its existence, which leaves the inscription tantalizingly unresolved for the casual visitor. The church it now inhabits, St Peakaun's, is associated with the early Irish saint Mochaomhóg, also known as Peakaun, lending the site a devotional continuity that stretches back well over a millennium. That this small carved stone was preserved within the church fabric rather than lost or reused elsewhere suggests it was regarded as significant by those who built or rebuilt the walls around it.

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