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

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Stone Monuments

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

An ogham stone rarely begins its afterlife stuffed into a field boundary, but that is precisely where this fragment turned up, wedged into a stone fence near a barn at Ballintermon House on the Dingle Peninsula.

Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along a central stem line, usually the edge of a standing stone. The system was used primarily between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries to record personal names, and stones bearing these inscriptions are found in significant numbers across Kerry. What makes this particular fragment slightly vexing is that it survives from one end only, and the break in the stone has taken part of the inscription with it.

The readable portion of the inscription was recorded as ROGNO, a personal name, by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in his 1945 Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum, though the stone was fractured immediately before the R. A handwritten annotation by O'Kelly on a personal copy of that same volume confirms the reading. Macalister went further, suggesting the original name was more likely DROGNO, drawing a comparison with a second ogham inscription found at Ballyandreen, also in Kerry, where a similar name appears. The stone was removed from its undignified position in the fence at some point after discovery and transferred to University College Cork before eventually finding a permanent home in Kerry County Museum in Tralee, which is where it can be found today.

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