Cross-slab, Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry

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Crosses & Monuments

Cross-slab, Cahersiveen, Co. Kerry

In the tidying up of a graveyard, history can quietly disappear underfoot.

In Cahersiveen town, a wedge-shaped, disused burial ground contains the poorly preserved remains of a medieval parish church, and around its southern side lies a peculiar pavement: old grave-markers, removed during graveyard clearances in recent decades, repurposed as flat paving stones. Among them, face-up and now functioning as ground cover rather than monument, is a carved cross-slab, a stone that was almost certainly once a grave-marker in its own right.

The slab measures just over a metre in length, thirty-five centimetres wide, and roughly nine centimetres thick. On its upper surface, an outline Latin cross has been carved, the simplest and one of the oldest forms of Christian grave commemoration in Ireland. A cross-slab of this type typically marked an early medieval burial, with the incised cross serving as both a religious symbol and an identifier of the grave beneath. This particular example is associated with a church site recorded as part of the broader medieval ecclesiastical landscape of the Iveragh Peninsula, documented in detail by archaeologists A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan in their 1996 survey of South Kerry.

The slab now lies flat, integrated into the paving on the south side of the ruined church, which makes it easy to walk past without registering what it is. Visitors to the graveyard should look down as much as around; what might read as ordinary flagging is, in this case, the displaced remnant of a burial tradition centuries old.

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