It is not in a museum, not behind a fence, and not marked on any roadside sign. It is simply there, in a garden, doing what it has presumably done for well over a thousand years, which is to record a name in a script that most passers-by would not recognise even if they saw it.

Ogham is an early medieval alphabet, used roughly between the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by groups of strokes cut along the edge of a stone. The Inchincummer fragment came to light when the landowner was levelling a field bank that happened to run across the site of an old enclosure. The stone is small, just 0.60 metres in length, and is clearly a fragment of something larger. What survives of the inscription is legible enough: RUDDAG(G), followed by a gap where the rest has been lost. The partial name probably ended in NI, giving a full form that may be the equivalent of the later Irish name Ruadhán. Such ogham inscriptions are typically personal names, often those of the person commemorated or the person claiming ownership of the land. The connection to an enclosure site nearby is telling; these stones often marked territory or burial grounds associated with early Christian or pre-Christian communities.

The stone has not been moved far from where it was found, which gives it a particular kind of continuity. It did not end up in a county museum or a heritage centre. Instead, it passed from a field bank into a garden, looked after by the person who happened to dig it up, in a part of Kerry where such discoveries are not entirely unusual but rarely stay quite so local.