Ogham stone (present location), Baile An Tsagairt, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone (present location), Baile An Tsagairt, Co. Kerry

On a low but conspicuous hillock between Dingle Harbour and Trabeg, ten early medieval stones have been gathered into a circle within an old enclosure known as An Cheallúnach or An Lisín, at the site of Ballintaggart church and its associated burial ground.

The arrangement is something of an act of curation: the stones were collected from various locations in the surrounding area, none precisely documented, and brought together within this circular earthwork. One of them is especially striking. A boulder measuring 1.07 metres in length carries two distinct forms of marking on the same surface: a plain Greek cross incised into its flattened upper face, and an ogham inscription running along its edge. Ogham is an early Irish script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge or face of a stone, and used mainly between the fourth and seventh centuries to record names and lineages.

The inscription on this particular stone reads MAQQI-IARI KOI MAQQI MUCCOI DOVVINIAS, a formula characteristic of early Irish memorial stones, combining personal names with ancestral or tribal affiliations. The third word presented difficulties: only five of the vowel notches are clearly legible, but the scholar R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945, was confident that KOI was the correct reading. The co-presence of the Greek cross and the ogham text places the stone at an interesting intersection, where an older epigraphic tradition overlaps with the visual vocabulary of early Christianity. Whether the cross was added to a pre-existing inscription or both elements were carved at the same time is the kind of question such stones rarely answer cleanly.

The site sits within a churchyard setting, and the ten stones, now standing in a ring within the enclosure, can be visited. The hillock is modest in height but open enough that the stones are visible against the skyline from the approach. Given that the stones were gathered from an imprecisely known scatter of original locations, the circle itself is a relatively modern arrangement, which lends the place a slightly composite quality. The individual inscriptions, including this one, have been recorded as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which has produced detailed digital documentation of the stones.

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