Inscribed stone, Corkan, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Stone Monuments

Inscribed stone, Corkan, Co. Westmeath

Lying on the floor of an underground stone passage in County Westmeath, a large inscribed stone sits in an unusual position for something that may carry one of Ireland's oldest writing systems.

Most ogham stones, which bear an early medieval Irish script rendered as a series of notches and lines cut along a central stem, are found upright, marking boundaries or graves. This one lies flat, set into the centre of the floor of a souterrain, an artificial underground passage or chamber typically built during the early medieval period for storage or refuge, and only discovered in the context of that structure.

Field investigators who visited the site in 1977 recorded the letter 'U' and possibly 'I' picked out of the stone's upper surface. A second report from the same year described a number of grooves that appear to have been enlarged by pocking, a technique of repeated small strikes used to deepen or clarify incised marks. Whether these grooves constitute genuine ogham characters or something older and less classifiable remains uncertain; the stone is listed as a possible ogham stone rather than a confirmed one. Adding a degree of local intrigue, a second possible ogham stone lies on the entrance avenue to Oldtown House, roughly 425 metres to the west, raising the question of whether this corner of Westmeath had a particular significance in the early medieval period that the surviving landscape has not yet fully explained. The inscribed stone itself sits within gently undulating pasture, on a small natural rise, the kind of low, unassuming ground feature that often conceals earlier activity beneath it.

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