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

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Stone Monuments

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

A small, square-sectioned stone bearing an inscription in one of Ireland's oldest writing systems now sits in a modern enclosure in Ardcanaght, Co. Kerry, somewhat removed from where it spent most of its existence.

It arrived here as a transplant, having originally stood in a burial ground recorded on historical Ordnance Survey maps as Killeen Old Burial Ground, a short distance away. Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a stone, and was used primarily to record personal names, often as grave markers or territorial indicators. This stone shares its present enclosure with a standing stone bearing rock art, an arrangement that gives the site an odd layered quality, objects from quite different periods and purposes now grouped together for their protection.

The stone was among two ogham stones discovered in the 1940s by the Tralee Field Club during their investigations of the burial ground. When the scholar R. A. S. Macalister recorded it in 1945, he described it as roughly four feet high, square in horizontal section, and broken in two. He read its inscription as LMCBLTCL LT, a sequence that does not resolve neatly into a recognisable name or formula, which is not unusual with damaged or weathered ogham texts. The stone measures 0.86 metres above ground and is only around 0.15 metres across, making it a slender, modest object. It has since been examined as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses digital scanning to capture inscriptions that may be difficult or impossible to read with the naked eye.

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