Fewer pause to take in the pair of ogham stones also on display in the same exhibition, one of which travelled a considerable distance to end up here, in a glass case in Dublin, after a journey that began in a very different kind of darkness.

Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a standing stone, and used primarily to record personal names in an early form of Irish. This particular stone was found around 1843 inside a souterrain at a ringfort in Fortwilliam townland, County Kerry. A souterrain is an underground passage or chamber, usually built from stone, associated with early medieval settlements and thought to have served for storage or refuge. The ringfort itself is recorded as KE021-138. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, whose monumental cataloguing of Irish ogham stones remains a standard reference, recorded the inscription in his 1945 survey as reading: ANM VEDLLOIGGOI MACI SEDDOINI. The formula is a recognisable one in ogham epigraphy; ANM is an Old Irish word meaning "name of", and MACI means "son of", so the stone effectively records the name of Vedlloiggos, son of Seddoinos, whoever those individuals may have been.

The stone is displayed as part of the Book of Kells exhibition in the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin, which charges an admission fee and is open to the public throughout the year, though queues can be long during the summer months. If you are visiting specifically to see the ogham stones rather than the manuscript, it is worth knowing they are often overlooked in the crowds. Look carefully at the carved edges rather than the flat face of the stone, which is where the ogham script runs. Having come so far from a Kerry hillside, the inscription deserves a moment of quiet attention.