Stone, Fiddaun, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Stone Monuments

Stone, Fiddaun, Co. Kilkenny

Standing alone in the middle of a large field on a south-east-facing slope east of Saddle Hill, this grit pillar is easy to walk past without realising that its edges carry a script roughly fifteen centuries old.

The stone is substantial, reaching 2.1 metres in height and 0.8 metres in width, and its west face bears an ogham inscription, the ancient Irish writing system in which letters are represented by notches and scores cut along the edge or across the face of a stone.

The inscription runs along both edges of the west face and was recorded by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister in 1945, catalogued as number 31 in his corpus of ogham stones. He read it as DRUGNO MAQI MUCOI [--] NAMI, a formula common to early medieval Irish memorial stones: a personal name, here Drugno, followed by MAQI meaning "son of", and MUCOI indicating tribal or kin-group affiliation, with part of that final name now lost. Macalister noted that the stone had "suffered badly from cattle and weather-wear", which accounts for the gap in the reading. The name Drugno and the fragmentary kin-group designation are all that remain of whoever this stone was raised to commemorate, probably sometime in the fifth or sixth century.

The stone sits in the centre of an open field, exposed to the same elements that have been wearing it down for centuries. The surviving scores are on the west face, so approaching from that side gives the best chance of making out what remains of the inscription, though the damage Macalister described has not improved with time.

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