SNIPPET: Bryan HODGSON's article, "Irish Ways Live On in Dingle," appeared in the April 1976 issue of the "Smithsonian" Washington D.C. magazine. Bryan, on the senior editorial staff, wrote that he was 'an Irishman by half,' his mother was born in Cork, and he had spent childhood holidays in West Clare, not far north. "... No spirits mourn at the Stone of Reask, which marks the site of an ancient monastery near Ballyferriter. But as I gaze at the gaunt monolith, with its Greek cross carved like a fossil flower atop a net of abstract spirals, the sun's slant turns spirals into eyes, and suddenly I glimpse the death's head worshiped by the ancient ones of Ireland. Perhaps the artist who carved it some 1,500 years ago purposely combined Christian symbol with pagan design. Reask was a holy place in the earliest days of Ireland's Christianity, and the stone stands like a challenge to the 'gallauns,' the holy pillars of the Druids, which still stand nearby. Reask was almost certainly a meeting ground between early monks and the Druids, whose sacred task was to preserved the unwritten law and legend of the Celts. Such meetings through the fifth and sixth centuries bore fruit. Irishmen learned Latin, and used its alphabet to make a written language that glittered with the storyteller's art. Converts brought the same talent to Christianity. For six centuries Irish monks were famed throughout Europe for the rigor of their training and the vigor of their tongues. The Irish scholars continued the tradition of the 'filid' - a caste of learned seers honored in Ireland for a thousand years. Doncha O CONCHUIR is something of a 'fili' himself. He is a teacher at Ballyferriter school, and his recently (1970s) published book, 'Corca Dhuibhne,' which presents a detailed study of the peninsula's archeology and history, is one of the few works of modern scholarship to be printed exclusively in Irish. 'Students of the language should have something to chew on besides old tales,' he says. 'And we should not have to study the history of our own land in a foreign tongue.' Doncha is too charitable a man and too conscientious a scholar to abandon me to my monoglot ignorance. he teaches me the language of stone and sets me on the way. Near Reask, I enter the Gallarus Oratory, a small chapel shaped like an overturned boat. Its unmortared stone walls have stood against Atlantic storms for more than a thousand years. The early monks built many such cells and chapels on Corca Dhuibhne's islands, cliffs, and mountaintops. Certainly they felt closer to God on that wild seacoast. Perhaps their faith gave birth to the proverb that says, 'Heaven lies in he wet, a foot and a half above the head of a man.' Monks produced the first written Irish poetry. With a Celt's eye for worldly beauty, one of them wrote: 'Let us adore the Lord/Maker of wondrous things/Great bright Heaven with its angels/And on earth the white-waved sea.' And another, taking a spur-of-the-moment holiday from scholarship in the ninth century, wrote this beguiling verse in Irish on one of the pages of his weighty work: "I and Pangur Ban my cat/'Tis a like task we are at/Hunting mice is his delight/Hunting words I sit all night.' It pleases me to think that Gallarus, too, may have been the cheerier for a cat. A mile away in the graveyard of the ruined 12th-century church of Kilmalkedar, I find a pillar of stone cut with the codelike lines of Ogham script, probably Latin-based, the earliest alphabet of the Celts. Nearby a huge cross battered crudely from a slab of stone leans toward a plaster Madonna. At the base is a jar of plastic flowers. The grass whispers, and centuries blur and blend..."