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

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

An ancient Kerry stone carrying an early medieval inscription in ogham, the script used in Ireland roughly between the fourth and seventh centuries in which letters are represented by groups of notches cut along a central stemline, now finds itself in Dublin South City, far from where it was first raised.

It is one of four ogham stones that originated in Whitefield, County Kerry, and its presence in the capital is a consequence of an 1853 exhibition rather than any archaeological excavation programme. That is a fairly unusual origin story for a stone monument.

The four Whitefield stones were displayed in Dublin by the MacGillicuddy of the Reeks at the Dublin Exhibition of 1853, and at least two of them, this stone among them, had been discovered inside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement sites and used for storage or refuge. The souterrain in question was reputedly located on the northwest side of Baunclune House in the Whitefield townland, though it does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps and no surface trace of it remains today. The stone itself stands at least 1.06 metres high and is trapezoidal in section, measuring 0.26 metres by 0.23 metres. Its inscription is cut in broad, deep scores along both angles of the stone. The right-hand angle is badly damaged, and the scholar R.A.S. Macalister, writing in 1945, could only partially reconstruct the text there as L[A]G[O]BB, a reading later confirmed by Damian McManus in 1991. The second angle preserves the sequence MUCO TUCACAC, which scholars read as a formulaic ancestral name phrase of the kind commonly found on ogham stones.

The stone has been recorded as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses photogrammetry and three-dimensional scanning to document Ireland's ogham corpus in detail. Anyone wishing to examine the inscription closely, or to read the scholarly record, can access the project's entry for this stone at ogham.celt.dias.ie under the reference CIIC 218. The physical stone is catalogued at its present Dublin South City location, though visitors intending to see it in person should note that the notes do not specify a publicly accessible display site, so it is worth confirming its precise whereabouts before making the trip.

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