Ogham stone, Ardywanig, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Ardywanig, Co. Kerry

In a field behind a modern farmyard in Ardywanig, County Kerry, there is an ancient stone that nobody can see.

It is not lost, exactly. According to local knowledge, it was deliberately buried in the 1960s, more or less where it once stood, and there it presumably remains, a few feet underground in otherwise unremarkable pasture.

Ogham stones are among the earliest physical records of the Irish language, carved with a system of notches and strokes along the edge of upright stones, typically dating from the fourth to the seventh century. The Ardywanig stone was recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps under the name Gallaun, a term used across Ireland for a standing stone, which suggests it was still visible and locally known at the time of the survey. It was formally catalogued as an ogham stone by Walsh in 1972, but by then the stone had already been in the ground for roughly a decade. Whatever inscription it may have carried, if any remains legible, is now inaccessible. A possible second ogham stone survives approximately 750 metres to the north, hinting that this corner of Kerry may once have had a modest concentration of these early medieval monuments.

There is nothing to see at the site as it stands today. The location is on private farmland, and the stone itself is buried rather than displayed or marked. Its interest lies less in what a visitor might find and more in what the episode quietly illustrates: that the attrition of the archaeological record is not always the result of ancient catastrophe or simple neglect, but sometimes of a specific, remembered decision made within living memory.

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Pete F
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