Ogham stone, Inchinanagh, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Inchinanagh, Co. Kerry

Most ogham stones stand upright, monument-like, the way we expect ancient inscriptions to present themselves.

This one lies flat. Stretched across rough pasture near the eastern bank of the Slaheny River in County Kerry, the stone is a long, low cuboid, nearly three metres in length and less than a metre tall, oriented on a northeast-southwest axis. The ogham inscription, rather than running along a vertical edge as is typical, appears on the southeast edge of the upper surface, as though the stone was always meant to be read from above. Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by groups of notches or strokes cut along a central stemline, most often the edge or corner of a standing stone.

The inscription was recorded by R. A. S. Macalister in his landmark 1945 catalogue of Irish ogham stones, where he transcribed it as reading 'ORIBRASSIA'. The name is weathered and the stone's exposure to the elements has not been kind, but the reading survives. Macalister's two-volume corpus, published in the 1940s, remains a foundational reference for ogham studies, and Inchinanagh is among the more quietly unusual entries in it, not for dramatic circumstance but for the simple oddness of its horizontal orientation and the relative obscurity of the name it carries. 'ORIBRASSIA' does not appear with any frequency in the ogham record, and its precise meaning or the identity of the person it commemorates, if it commemorates a person at all, remains unclear.

The stone sits in what is described as rough level pasture, close to the river, which places it in a working agricultural landscape rather than any kind of formal archaeological setting. Anyone seeking it out should expect no signage or interpretation, just a large recumbent stone in a field, its inscription worn into the upper edge and easy to miss if the light is not with you.

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Pete F
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