Ogham stone (present location), Baile An Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone (present location), Baile An Fheirtéaraigh, Co. Kerry

An ancient inscription, read by almost no one who passed it for who knows how long, was quietly holding up a wall.

In 1989, an ogham stone, one of those upright or repurposed slabs carved with an early medieval Irish script that runs in notches along the stone's edge, was found embedded in the gable wall of an outhouse in the townland of Coumlanders, near Lispole in County Kerry. The outhouse belonged to a man named Eoghan O Griffín, and the stone had apparently been built into the structure at some point, its inscription hidden in plain sight within the masonry. Once removed and examined, it was found to read RETAGIN MAQI DOV, a formula typical of ogham stones, recording a personal name followed by the word for "son of" and a second name, a form of ancestral identification used across Ireland and parts of Britain from roughly the fourth to the seventh centuries.

The stone has since been moved to Músaem Chorca Dhuibhne in Baile An Fheirtéaraigh, the small West Kerry town better known in English as Ballyferriter, where it is now held in the collection. The inscription itself has been documented by scholar Damian McManus, and the stone was later included in the "Ogham in 3D" project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, an initiative that uses photogrammetry and three-dimensional scanning to capture and preserve ogham inscriptions in extraordinary detail, making them accessible for study in ways that physical examination alone cannot always permit. That a stone bearing a name from perhaps fifteen hundred years ago spent an indeterminate stretch of time as building material in County Kerry is, in its way, entirely in keeping with how these monuments have fared across the centuries.

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