Ogham stone (present location), Tralee, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone (present location), Tralee, Co. Kerry

Along the way, an ancient inscribed pillar was broken apart and pressed into service as a stepping stone in a stile.

That a fragment of early medieval Irish writing survived this indignity at all is quietly remarkable. The piece now held in Kerry County Museum in Tralee is a sandstone slab measuring 0.66 metres long and just 0.07 metres thick, bearing a partial ogham inscription whose remaining letters, deeply cut and well-preserved, read: . . . ]QNETN[ . . . with two vowel notches following the final consonant before the edge of the stone breaks away. Ogham is an early Irish alphabet typically carved along the edges or faces of standing stones, with groups of notches and strokes representing individual letters; it was used broadly between the fourth and seventh centuries AD, most commonly to record personal names.

The stone originally stood in the townland of Letter in County Kerry, and it was there, built into a stile a short distance south of MacCrehin's Castle, that it was found. The castle, a tower house of the kind common across Munster from the late medieval period onward, apparently served as a convenient quarry or landmark near which the fragment had been repurposed. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, who catalogued ogham stones extensively across Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century, recorded this stone in 1939 and again in his landmark 1945 corpus. The surviving sequence of letters tantalises without resolving: the inscription is almost certainly a name or part of a genealogical formula, the standard content of such stones, but too much is missing on either side to reconstruct it with confidence. What can be said is that the cuts themselves are clear and deliberate, made by someone who knew the script and took care with it, even if the stone eventually found its way into a farmer's boundary feature centuries later.

The fragment is now catalogued as part of the Kerry County Museum collection in Tralee, where it can be seen alongside other material from the county's prehistoric and early medieval past.

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