Ogham stone (present location), Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
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Stone Monuments
A stone that began its life in a Cork underground passage and ended up in a Dublin museum collection is not an uncommon trajectory for early medieval artefacts, but this particular example carries a quietly compelling detail: it arrived in two pieces, snapped clean through, yet the ancient inscription carved along its edge remained perfectly legible.
That inscription, in ogham, the early Irish script rendered as a series of notches and strokes along a central stem line, reads DALAGNI MAQI DALI, a formula typical of early medieval memorial stones, giving a personal name followed by the word for "son of" and a father's name.
The stone was found at Monataggart, County Cork, where it had been reused as one of the upright structural stones inside a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlements and used for storage or refuge. The discovery was recorded by Quarry in 1896. It was one of two ogham stones recovered from the same souterrain, both subsequently purchased by the Royal Irish Academy. The stone measures 0.9 metres high and 0.4 metres wide by 0.1 metres thick. R.A.S. Macalister catalogued it in 1945, noting the break but confirming that the reading was, in his words, "quite clear and certain." It is now held in the collection of the National Museum of Ireland. More recently, the stone has been digitally recorded as part of the Ogham in 3D project, an initiative by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies that is building a searchable archive of ogham stones across Ireland and beyond.
The stone is held within the National Museum of Ireland's collection in Dublin. For those who want to examine the inscription in detail without travelling to the museum, the Ogham in 3D project offers high-resolution three-dimensional scans and scholarly notes at ogham.celt.dias.ie, where the stone is catalogued as CIIC no. 119. The digital record is particularly useful for reading the notches of the script, which can be difficult to trace on a physical surface, especially on a stone that has already been broken and handled across two centuries of institutional life.