Ogham stone, Rathmalode, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Rathmalode, Co. Kerry

For an unknown stretch of time, an ancient inscribed stone sat horizontally above the doorway of an outhouse in Lougher townland on the Dingle Peninsula, doing the mundane work of a lintel.

The stone carries an ogham inscription, ogham being an early medieval script used mainly in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries, in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a standing stone. This particular stone reputedly came from a rath, a circular earthwork enclosure, in the neighbouring townland of Rathmalode, though members of the Co. Kerry Field Club, writing in 1939, raised the possibility that it had originally come from a grave-site in Lougher itself. Their informant died before that detail could be confirmed, and so the question of the stone's true origin remains open.

The inscription, read by Cuppage in 1986, runs ERCAVICCAS MAQI CO, where MAQI is the ogham formula for "son of", a standard patronymic construction found across many Kerry stones. The name of the father is lost: the stone is broken at one end, and only two letters of the final word survive. The stone measures 1.24 metres long, 0.34 metres wide, and 0.1 metres thick, a substantial slab that must have served the outhouse door rather well. Macalister had already catalogued it in 1945, assigning it the number 196 in his corpus of ogham inscriptions. It has since been studied 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 to record inscriptions that centuries of weathering and, in this case, secondary use as building material, have worn or obscured.

The stone is now held at Musáem Chorca Dhuibhne in Ballyferriter, the small museum that serves as a centre for the archaeology and culture of the Corca Dhuibhne peninsula. Visitors there can see the inscription in person, including that tantalising broken edge where a name trails off into two letters and then nothing.

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