Ogham stone, Tralee, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Tralee, Co. Kerry

A sandstone pillar turns up in Tralee during archaeological works in 1995, its original location completely unknown.

Whoever placed it there did so in modern times, and the stone itself offers few clues about where it came from before that. What it does carry, faintly, are the remnants of an ogham inscription, the ancient Irish script that uses a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone to represent letters, and which is most commonly associated with early medieval memorial pillars found throughout Munster and Wales.

The stone is roughly square in section, tapering towards the top, and it is in poor condition: badly eroded and spalled, meaning the surface has flaked away in places, taking much of the inscription with it. One face, the sinister side in the technical vocabulary of ogham study, is entirely illegible due to this wear. On the dexter side, close to the top, some characters survive. Working through what remains, scholar Fionnbarr Moore identified two very faint strokes crossing the angle of the stone, read as G, followed by two more strokes also read as G, then a significant gap, then a sequence that reads with reasonable clarity as D IOC, followed by five faint Q strokes and three vowel notches that may represent U. The tentative reading runs: G G, then a stretch of lost letters, then DIOC Q U. Nothing intelligible emerges from this sequence, but the surviving marks are consistent with genuine ogham characters rather than later imitation, making this a damaged but real example of the script rather than a decorative copy.

The stone is held at Kerry County Museum in Tralee, where it was catalogued under registration number KCM/18/2009. It was formally registered as a Historic Monument in 1995, the same year it was found, under the National Monuments (Amendment) Act 1987. Where it stood before someone moved it, and what name or phrase its inscription once spelled out, remains entirely open.

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