Ogham stone, Seemochuda, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Stone Monuments
At some point before the late nineteenth century, two stones were rolled off a small hillock in County Waterford and into a stream, where they have presumably remained ever since. Whether they carried ogham inscriptions, the early medieval script carved as a series of notches along a stone's edge used to record names in an archaic form of Irish, nobody now knows. They were never retrieved, and they were never identified.
The hillock at Seemochuda once held three stones in total. The one that survived removal was repurposed as the back of what was known locally as the Saint's chair, a structure whose components were eventually dispersed; that surviving ogham stone is now held at University College Cork. The other two were simply pushed down the slope. Writing in the Waterford Archaeological Journal in 1899, P. Power recorded the local tradition that all three had originally stood together on the hillock, though whether the two lost stones bore inscriptions equivalent to the survivor remains an open question. The identification of those stones has never been resolved.