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

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Stone Monuments

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

On a low but conspicuous hillock between Dingle Harbour and Trabeg, nine early medieval stones have been gathered into a deliberate circle within a circular enclosure on the summit.

They were not placed there in antiquity. Collected from various, now imprecisely remembered, locations in the surrounding area, they were arranged here to preserve them, and the effect is quietly strange: monuments that once stood alone in fields or beside trackways now face one another in a kind of accidental congregation, sharing a space they were never intended to share.

Ogham is an early Irish script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge or face of a stone, and most inscriptions record personal names in a formulaic pattern. This particular boulder, 1.2 metres long, is noticeably less regular and smooth than its companions, though it shares the same rounded oval form. Its inscription has resisted easy reading. The two most plausible interpretations come from R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945, and from O'Kelly, who annotated Macalister's Corpus: the former reads CUNAMAQQI AVI CORBBI, the latter CULI MAQQI AVI CORBI. The word MAQQI, meaning "son of", appears in both versions, suggesting the stone commemorates an individual identified through his father's and grandfather's lineage, as was conventional in early medieval Ireland. The enclosure itself sits at the site of Ballintaggart church and an old burial ground, known in Irish as An Cheallúnach or An Lisín, adding another layer of long use to a place that was clearly significant across several periods. The stone has since been examined as part of the Ogham in 3D project, run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which has applied photogrammetry and digital imaging to ogham stones across Ireland in an effort to recover inscriptions that are faint or ambiguous.

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