Qualla: Darrynane Beg Ogham Stone

Darrynane Beg Ogham Stone: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A small boy named Little Erc had a son named Llatigni who died on the Iveragh Peninsula sometime in the early sixth century. His tribe carved his name into a slab of sandstone in a script of straight lines and notches and laid the stone flat near the strand. For roughly fifteen hundred years it lay there, slowly losing legibility to wind and salt. Then in the 1940s the Office of Public Works stood it back up by the side of the road, where it is one of the easiest ogham stones to visit in Ireland.

Darrynane Beg Ogham Stone: Reading the Notches

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ogham is an early medieval alphabet developed in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries AD. Letters are formed from groups of one to five straight notches cut across or to either side of a central stem line - usually the edge of a standing stone. The script enco...

Darrynane Beg Ogham Stone: Little Erc's Son

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Linguists have wrung quiet detail from those fading notches. The element -gno- in Llatigni is a diminutive particle, suggesting an underlying name of Laithbe or Laithech. The prefix Min- in Minerc is also a diminutive - so Llatigni's father was Erc Becc, Little Erc. These are not...

Darrynane Beg Ogham Stone: From Beach to Roadside

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The stone originally lay flat on Derrynane strand - a recumbent inscription, easy to miss, blending into the dunes. In the 1940s the Office of Public Works lifted it and erected it beside the local road, where it now stands roughly 2.1 metres tall as a marked National Monument. T...

Darrynane Beg Ogham Stone: Why It Matters

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There are flashier monuments on the Ring of Kerry. The Liberator's house, the Skelligs, the medieval church on Church Island - they all draw more tourists. The Darrynane Beg stone is just a weathered slab beside a small road, easy to drive past. But it carries something none of t...