Ogham stone, Kilcoolaght, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Kilcoolaght, Co. Kerry

At Kilcoolaght burial ground in County Kerry, a small group of ogham stones, the ancient Irish script carved as notched lines along the edge of a stone, has accumulated in unusual concentration.

There are at least seven of them here, possibly eight, gathered within iron railings put up in the 1940s at a site known in Irish as Cill Chuallachta. One of those stones carries a particular puzzle: what was long treated as two separate fragments turns out, on closer inspection, to be portions of a single surviving stone, measuring just over a metre in length and inscribed along two of its angles.

The scholar R.A.S. Macalister catalogued these fragments separately in his 1945 corpus of ogham inscriptions, assigning them different numbers, 210 and 212. Later work by O'Sullivan and Sheehan suggested the pieces join, forming one broken stone whose surviving characters include L and M on the larger fragment, and a partial reading of DUBE, possibly followed by a B, along with either a Q or an N on the smaller piece. The name DUBE may represent an early Irish personal name, though the inscription is too damaged for certainty. The site also carries a tradition, recorded by the antiquarian Richard Rolt Brash, that a church once stood on a rectangular patch of untilled ground a few yards from the cilleen, the small, informal burial ground associated with unbaptised children and others buried outside consecrated ground. No physical trace of that church remains.

The stone has since been digitally recorded as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, an initiative that uses high-resolution scanning to capture inscriptions that are often barely legible to the naked eye, preserving readings that weathering and time continue to obscure.

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