Qualla: Reask

Reask: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maoileann, CC BY-SA 4.0. At the center of the enclosure stands a stone roughly two metres tall, and on its face an artist working sometime between AD 500 and 800 carved a pattern that catches the eye even now: a cross sprouting spirals, the kind of design that looks like it should be on the page of an illuminated manuscript. The Reask Cross Pillar is one of the most beautiful surviving examples of early Christian Irish stonework, and it stands where it was set, in the middle of a low circular monastery a kilometre east of Ballyferriter on the Dingle Peninsula. The buildings around it have crumbled to their foundations. The pillar has not moved.

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Image: Maoileann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Reask: A Monastery the Size of a Garden

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bansheola, CC BY-SA 4.0. Early Irish monasteries were not the great medieval abbeys that came later — they were small communities of a few monks living in dry-stone huts inside a circular wall. Reask follows this pattern. Excavations in the 1970s and early 1980s by archaeologist Thomas Fanning revealed t...

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Image: Bansheola | CC BY-SA 4.0

Reask: The Cross Pillar

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cathy Cox, CC BY-SA 2.0. The pillar is the masterpiece. On its west face, a Greek cross sits within a circle, and from its arms emerge interlocking spirals — the same triple-spiral pattern (triskele) found in much older Celtic art, here baptized into Christian use. The letters DNE (an abbreviation of Dom...

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Image: Cathy Cox | CC BY-SA 2.0

Reask: What the Excavation Found

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cargoking, CC BY 3.0. Thomas Fanning's excavation, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in 1981, exposed graves, cross-inscribed stones smaller than the central pillar, and the foundations of buildings ranging from circular huts to a small rectangular church. Some of those carved st...

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Image: Cargoking | CC BY 3.0

Reask: The Quiet of It

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. The site is in state care as a national monument, but it is not heavily visited. There is no visitor centre, no entrance fee, no rope keeping you off the stones. You walk across a field from a small lane, push open a gate, and there it is: the low wall, the foundations of the hut...

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Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0