Stone sculpture, Curraheen, Co. Tipperary

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Stone Monuments

Stone sculpture, Curraheen, Co. Tipperary

A small stone slab set upright in a grass-covered cairn near Devilsbit Mountain in County Tipperary carries a carving that looks, at first glance, like an early medieval Irish Christ figure.

It has all the expected features: arms outstretched, a long robe decorated with vertical and horizontal lines, a torc at the neck, almond-shaped eyes, and a crown of thorns incised into a large oval head. The reverse and sides of the slab are covered in spiral motifs and what appears to be ogham script, the ancient Irish writing system that uses notches and lines cut along a central stem. The whole ensemble suggests the work of someone steeped in the visual language of early Christian Ireland. The problem is that the ogham gives the game away.

Ogham is conventionally read from the bottom of the stem upward. The inscription on the upper northwest angle of this slab, when read that way, produces the letters ACOI, which means nothing in particular. Read from top to bottom, however, it spells IOSA, the Irish word for Jesus. This reversal strongly suggests that whoever carved the inscription understood how ogham letters are formed but was unfamiliar with the medieval convention for reading direction. The carver appears to have been labelling the figure, writing a caption rather than composing an authentic early inscription. The spirals, too, are noted as somewhat random in their arrangement, and the overall style points toward a modern interpretation of an early medieval original rather than the thing itself. Scholars place the work tentatively within the Celtic Revival of the nineteenth century, though a twentieth-century date is also possible. The slab sits within an enclosure locally known as a burial ground, positioned at the eastern end of a cairn, a mound of stones that here measures roughly nine metres east to west and seven metres north to south.

The site faces north with open views toward the landscape below Devilsbit Mountain, a prominent ridge whose name alone has generated its share of folklore. The slab itself is small, less than sixty centimetres above ground, and some of the inscriptions on the eastern face are now partially obscured by lichen growth, which makes close reading of the secondary ogham difficult. The spiral on the southern side, with its two unequal whorls and a diagonal band crossing through one of them, is clearer and worth examining carefully alongside the more legible western face, where the Christ figure sits in low relief.

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