Ogham stone (present location), Baile An Ghóilín, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
Along the gravel verge of a driveway in Baile An Ghóilín, on the Dingle Peninsula, lies an ancient inscribed stone that nobody can quite place.
Its original find-spot is unknown, which for an ogham stone, one of those upright slabs incised in the early medieval Irish script that runs along the stone's edge in a series of notches and strokes, is a significant gap. Provenance matters enormously for these monuments; without it, a stone loses much of its ability to speak to the landscape it once marked.
The stone ended up here as part of a collection assembled by Lord Ventry, and it now rests, somewhat unceremoniously, beside the driveway leading to Coláiste Íde. It is a modest size, measuring 1.06 metres long with a circumference of around 1.14 metres. R. A. S. Macalister, who catalogued ogham stones exhaustively in 1945, read its inscription as MAQQI-ERCCIA MAQQI MUCOI DOVINIA, a formula typical of early Irish memorial stones and meaning, broadly, something like "of Mac-Erccia, son of the sept of Dovinia". Macalister also noted that the stone resembles the Ballintaggart group, a cluster of ogham stones from elsewhere on the Dingle Peninsula. That stylistic connection is tantalising, since it might hint at a general area of origin even if the precise find-spot is lost. What the stone cannot do any longer is fully confirm Macalister's reading; by the time Judith Cuppage documented it in 1986, many of the incised scores had become extremely faint, and only the final word of the inscription could still be traced with any confidence.
The stone sits beside the approach to Coláiste Íde, a secondary school on the peninsula, so access to the driveway is subject to the rhythms of an active institution. Visitors with a particular interest in the inscription itself may find it worth consulting Macalister's reading in advance, since tracing the ogham characters directly on the stone is now largely a matter of knowing where to look rather than seeing anything clearly. A 3D model of the monument is available online at skfb.ly/6oTZz, which offers a more legible view of the surface than the stone itself is likely to provide.