Ogham stone, Church Island, Co. Kerry

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Church Island, Co. Kerry

A slab of stone bearing both a finely geometric early Christian cross and a line of ogham script, the ancient Irish alphabet carved as notches and scores along a stone's edge, might seem unremarkable enough in a Kerry context.

What makes this particular piece quietly strange is the relationship between those two inscriptions: the ogham was added after the cross design was already in place, its letters working around and even overlapping elements of the earlier decoration. Someone, at some point after the cross was carved, had a name to record and used the available surface regardless.

The stone was found on Church Island in Kerry, having been placed in a secondary position in the south-western part of the island some time before excavations were carried out in 1945 by O'Kelly and Kavanagh. It is a relatively modest slab, measuring 1.49 metres tall and 36 centimetres wide, and was already fractured at its base when found. The cross itself is a precise piece of work, compass-drawn and incised, consisting of a central circle flanked by four smaller circles, each connected to an enclosing outer circle by petals with clipped, truncated tips, with a broad shaft hanging below. The excavators proposed a date of between 650 and 750 AD for this design. The ogham inscription, running along both edges and across the top of the slab, reads as BECCDINN MACI RI[T(T)A]VVECASS, meaning roughly "Beccdinn son of Rittavecas", though the middle portion of the third word is uncertain; a faint additional score on the side of the stone may represent an attempt by the carver to squeeze in the conjectured letters. In one place, the final notches of a letter are superimposed directly on a symbol from the cross design, confirming that the inscription came second.

The stone is no longer on the island. It is currently held at the Cork Public Museum, where it can be examined in person. It has also been digitally recorded as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which has produced high-resolution three-dimensional models of ogham stones from across Ireland, allowing the faint and ambiguous scores on pieces like this one to be studied in detail that no photograph can quite replicate.

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