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

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Stone Monuments

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

A stone that spent perhaps fifteen centuries in one place now stands in the grounds of Chute Hall near Tralee, far from the windswept promontory where it began.

It is one of six ogham stones removed from the early medieval burial site of Cillvickillane, or Cill Mhic Uíleáin, in Ballinrannig townland on the Dingle Peninsula, and its presence here is the result of a mixture of catastrophe, antiquarian curiosity, and nineteenth-century land ownership.

Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by notches and scores cut along the edge, or arris, of a stone, typically recording a personal name and lineage. The Cillvickillane site remained largely invisible until a storm at the end of the eighteenth century tore it open, revealing seven ogham stones, a possible fragment of an eighth, a cross-inscribed stone, graves with slab lining, quantities of bone, and the ruins of several houses. The antiquarian John Windele visited and sketched the scene in 1838, recording the stones arranged in a rough semi-circle on top of the mound, with a grave nearby. Lord Ventry removed six of the stones from the site in the mid-nineteenth century; four of them were repurposed to line the driveway at Burnham House, now Coláiste Íde, between Dingle and Ventry, while two, including this one, were brought to Chute Hall. The seventh stone was left behind at the original location.

This particular stone is 0.96 metres high and tapers from 0.51 metres wide at the base to just 0.18 metres at the top. Its inscription has worn badly and resists easy reading. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister offered two different transcriptions across his career, reading it as LUBBAIS MAQQI DUN....S in 1945, having earlier proposed G[E]BB[AI]S MAQQ[I T]AN[AI]S in 1897. The discrepancy turns on a single initial letter; Macalister came to believe the carver had made an error and corrected it by cutting additional scores on either side of the arris, effectively converting one letter into another. Whether that interpretation is correct or not, the stone carries within its worn surface both a name from early medieval Ireland and the visible traces of someone trying to fix a mistake.

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