Souterrain, Imleach An Daingin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Settlement Sites
Between the old Dingle railway station and the road to Lispole, a stone that was once carved with ogham script, the early medieval Irish alphabet incised as a series of notches and strokes along a central stem line, has ended up propped against a field wall.
It is not where it started. At some point, probably during the early medieval period, the stone was repurposed as structural material for a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage or chamber typically associated with a rath, the circular earthwork enclosure that formed the basis of many Irish farmsteads between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. The rath here has been destroyed, the souterrain collapsed or dismantled, and the ogham stone now leans against the western side of a north-south field boundary, doing none of the jobs it was ever made to do.
The stone's earlier role as either a lintel spanning the entrance or a jamb stone forming part of the doorway of the souterrain was noted by two nineteenth-century antiquarians. John Windele recorded it in 1848, and Richard Rolt Brash returned to it in 1879. Both were writing at a time when ogham stones across Munster were being systematically catalogued for the first time, and the Dingle Peninsula, with its dense concentration of early Christian and pre-Christian monuments, attracted particular attention. The presence of an inscribed stone being used as raw building material was not unusual; many ogham stones across Ireland were recycled in exactly this way, their original memorial or boundary function forgotten, their physical bulk simply convenient. What makes this one quietly telling is the layering: an inscribed stone, folded into a souterrain, inside a rath, all three now reduced to a single displaced object in a Kerry field.