The oratory stands 2.75 metres high and follows the same boat-shaped plan as the more famous oratory at Gallarus, a few kilometres to the north. There are no mortar joints here. Each stone has been chosen and laid so that the wall corbels inward, course by course, until the roof closes itself overhead without need for timber or thatch. It is a building made out of the patience of its builders. The walls slope just enough that rain runs down rather than in. Inside, the space is small enough that two adults must stoop and turn to share it, which is exactly the point: this was a place to be alone with a candle and a prayer, not a stage for a congregation. The finial on the gable, a small carved cap of stone, is the only flourish the builder allowed himself.

A few paces from the oratory the ground dips toward a souterrain, an underground passage of dry-laid stone that locals call Poll na Sagart, the priest's hole. The name carries the memory of the Penal era, when Catholic clergy in Ireland were hunted by law and parishioners hid them where they could. Whether priests actually sheltered in this particular souterrain is the kind of question folklore refuses to settle, but the story has been told here long enough that the stones now belong to it. South of the oratory a holy well, Tobermanaghan, still seeps from the hillside. Around the church an ancient burial ground holds cross-inscribed slabs, their carvings softened by twelve centuries of weather. The whole site reads like a layered manuscript: every generation that came up the hill left a mark, and none erased what came before.

The ogham stone at Ballymorereagh stands 1.68 metres high, and along one of its edges runs a line of notches that, transliterated, reads QENILOCI MAQI MAQI-AINIA MUC[OI] — of Cellach, son of the son of Ania, of the tribe of someone whose name the weather has taken away. Scholar Sabine Ziegler dated the inscription to somewhere between the fifth and seventh centuries AD. Ogham is the first writing system the Irish made for themselves, a kind of cipher cut along the edge of a stone where the corner of the rock becomes the stem-line of the alphabet. To read it you let your fingers do as much work as your eyes. Whoever Cellach was, his people thought him worth the labour of cutting this stone, and the stone has outlasted everyone who could have told us why.

There is no ticket booth at Ballymorereagh, no car park, no railing. The site is reached by climbing a narrow boreen and ducking under a gate that wears moss the way other gates wear paint. Sheep look up, decide you are not interesting, and resume eating. On a clear day, looking back down the slope of Lateeve, Dingle Bay opens out below and the Atlantic does what the Atlantic does, throwing weather at the coast in restless layers of grey and silver. The oratory has watched that sea for at least a thousand years. The ogham stone has watched it for longer. Standing between them on a cold afternoon, with the wind pulling at your jacket and a few pale sheep for company, the centuries press very lightly on the shoulders.