Ogham stone, Rockfield Middle, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Stone Monuments
At some point in the early medieval period, six stones inscribed with ogham, an early Irish script in which letters are represented by notches and strokes along a central line, were placed underground as structural lintels inside a souterrain, the kind of stone-lined passage or chamber built beneath a rath, or ringfort, for storage or refuge.
That they were reused as building material even then tells its own story, but their subsequent journey above ground is stranger still.
The stones came to light in a rath in the townland of Rockfield Middle in County Kerry, recorded by Barry in 1891. Four of the six were subsequently taken from the souterrain and built into a cottage in the nearby village of Laharan, where they served a thoroughly domestic purpose: one, according to R.A.S. Macalister writing in 1945, acted as the lintel over the front door of a man named Patrick Quirk. Three of those four were later removed again and sent to Adare Manor in County Limerick, the seat of Lord Dunraven, where they remain. The fourth simply disappeared. Brash had described one of the surviving stones, now at Adare Manor, in 1879 as a tall, tapering monolith standing just over two metres above ground, inscribed on two angles of the same face. Macalister read its inscription as COILLABBOTAS MAQI CORBBI MAQI MOCOI QERAI, a genealogical formula typical of ogham stones, naming a person in relation to their father and tribal lineage, and suggested it possibly commemorated the father of the individual named on one of the companion stones. The Kerry townland where all six were first found retains no visible trace of them now.