Ogham stone (present location), Adare, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Stone Monuments
Standing in the grounds of Adare Manor in County Limerick is a stone that has no real business being there.
It began its recorded life on the slopes of Mangerton Mountain in County Kerry, beside what an early observer described as a grave-like enclosure, and it carries an inscription in ogham, the early medieval script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along a central stemline. Somewhere between that Kerry hillside and its current Limerick address, it crossed a county boundary, changed hands, and lost the opening of its inscription entirely.
The stone was first recorded by the antiquarian John Windele, who found it in Kerry in what was already a secondary location. Local tradition knew it as Dallan Diarmada, meaning Diarmait's pillar-stone, and held that it had originally been moved to that spot from a place called The Priest's Leap, a name that itself carries a whiff of folklore and flight. At some point in the nineteenth century, the Earl of Dunraven had the stone brought to Adare Manor, adding it to what was then one of the more enthusiastically antiquarian estates in Ireland. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister catalogued it in 1945 as number 222 in his corpus of ogham inscriptions, recording its dimensions as approximately 1.93 metres in length and reading the surviving inscription as the fragmentary sequence ...(N)EGGNI..., the beginning having been broken off in antiquity. What name or dedication the full inscription once carried is now impossible to say.
Adare Manor is today a luxury hotel, which means access to the grounds is not straightforward for a casual visitor. The stone itself is not prominently signposted as an archaeological object, and anyone making a specific effort to locate it should check in advance whether access is possible. For those with an interest in ogham, it is worth knowing that the stone's provenance is unusually layered even by the standards of a script whose monuments were frequently moved, reused, or repurposed across many centuries. A stone with a Kerry mountain on one end of its biography and a Limerick estate on the other, carrying a name tied to a figure called Diarmait and a tradition linked to a place called The Priest's Leap, is a small puzzle that no single visit is likely to solve.