Ogham stone (present location), Airghleann, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone (present location), Airghleann, Co. Kerry

On the exposed mountain gap between Masatiompan and the northern slopes of Brandon Mountain in County Kerry, a sandstone pillar stands just under two metres tall, inscribed on both faces and along its edges with carvings that span two religious worlds.

What makes the stone quietly remarkable is not just the ogham script running along its edges, but the evidence that the stone was deliberately reworked. A plinth-like step at its base led the scholar R.A.S. Macalister to conclude that an earlier slab had been cut away, most likely to erase a pagan inscription before Christian symbols were added in its place. The same stone that may once have carried a pre-Christian dedication was later dressed, carved with crosses, and reinscribed in the early medieval period.

Ogham is an early medieval script, usually carved as a series of notches and scores along the edge of a stone, and used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries. The inscription here reads QRIMITIR RON(AN)N MA(Q) COMOGANN, translating as Ronán the priest, son of Comgán. The two carved faces add further layers: one bears a Maltese cross with a hook-like expansion at the right arm, a form recognised as a chi-rho monogram, the opening letters of Christ in Greek. The opposite face carries a Maltese cross enclosed within a circle, its lower arm connected to the circle by a short stem. When Hitchcock first documented the stone, it was buried in peat to within roughly 0.6 metres of the top. It had fallen by 1937, and eventually disappeared beneath hillwash and a thin covering of sod. It was rediscovered and re-erected in 1982, only to fall again after winter storms, and was raised once more in 1995, this time set 4.4 metres to the north-west of the 1982 position in a more secure footing. Local knowledge suggested even that earlier location was already some ten to twelve metres downslope from where the stone had originally stood.

The stone sits in a high, windswept col with views dropping away on both sides of the mountain range, which gives some sense of why, across centuries of peat growth, storms, and hillwash, it kept being lost and found again. The current position is the result of practical necessity rather than archaeological precision, a small displacement with a long history behind it.

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