Ogham stone (present location), Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
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Stone Monuments
A stone now sitting in Dublin once carried its inscription underground in County Cork, tucked inside a souterrain, the kind of narrow, stone-lined passage that early medieval communities built beneath the earth for storage or refuge.
It is one of three ogham stones recovered from the same souterrain at Ahalisky, and the fact that all three ended up repurposed as building material in a subterranean structure tells its own quiet story about how these carved monuments were regarded, or disregarded, by later generations. Ogham itself is an early medieval script, most common in Ireland and parts of Wales and Scotland, in which letters are represented by a series of notches and lines cut along a central stem, usually the edge of a standing stone.
The scholar R. A. S. Macalister catalogued this particular stone in 1945, assigning it the number 69 in his corpus. He recorded its dimensions as four feet five inches tall, one foot two inches wide, and nine and a half inches deep, and read its inscription as GIRAGNI, a personal name in the genitive case of the sort typical of ogham memorial formulae. The other two stones from the same Ahalisky souterrain carry their own inscriptions, and together the group represents a concentration of early epigraphic material from a single Cork townland. More recently, the stone has been documented 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 record ogham stones across Ireland and beyond, making the inscriptions accessible and legible in ways that printed corpora cannot always manage.
The stone's present location is given as Dublin South City, which places it in an institutional or museum context rather than in any field or churchyard. Visitors interested in examining it directly should verify its exact whereabouts before travelling, as stones of this kind can move between storage, display, and conservation facilities. The Ogham in 3D database, maintained by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, holds detailed records including the three-dimensional scan, and is a practical first stop for anyone wanting to study the inscription closely without relying solely on Macalister's readings, which later scholarship, including Damian McManus's 1997 guide to ogham, has in some cases revisited and refined.