Ogham stone (present location), Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone (present location), Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

An ancient inscribed stone now residing in Dublin South City began its recorded life not in any church, field wall, or monastic enclosure, but deep beneath a bog in County Kerry, pulled from the peat along with a quernstone, a metal pot, burned wood, and a fragment of basketwork.

The combination is quietly puzzling: objects of domestic life, buried together roughly 1.8 to 2.1 metres below the surface in the townland of Reask, with the stone sitting about 1.2 metres above the base of the peat section itself.

Ogham is an early medieval script, most commonly found in Ireland and parts of Britain, in which letters are represented by groups of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone. This particular example, catalogued as no. 146 in R.A.S. Macalister's 1945 corpus of ogham inscriptions, carries the reading LuGuQriT MAqi QRITTi, a formula typical of the period: a personal name followed by the word for "son of" and the father's name. The scholar Damian McManus also examined the inscription in his 1991 study of the script. The stone itself is modest in scale, measuring 1.17 metres high, 0.20 metres wide, and 0.12 metres thick, and is broken at the top, so the full original text may be lost. On the opposite face, low down, there is a small plain cross, which suggests the stone was either carved or repurposed during an early Christian context. The stone was originally recorded under the Reask townland in Kerry, where a related find reference, KE042-151, logs the broader discovery.

The stone has since been moved to Dublin South City, which is where a visitor would need to go to see it in person. It has also been digitally documented as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which used photogrammetry to capture precise three-dimensional models of ogham stones across Ireland and beyond. The full record, including the digital model, can be explored through the project's searchable database at ogham.celt.dias.ie, where it appears under CIIC number 146. For those unable to locate it physically, the online record offers close reading of the inscription and the faint cross that might otherwise be easy to overlook.

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