Ogham stone, Knockboy, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Stone Monuments
At the medieval parish church of Seskinan in Knockboy, County Waterford, an ancient inscription lies built into the very fabric of the building, literally written into the wall. Seven ogham stones, the early medieval Irish script carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a stone, are associated with this church, and six of them have been repurposed as structural elements, mostly lintels spanning window and door openings. The seventh stands in a corner of the church itself. One particular stone, measuring roughly 1.2 metres long and about 20 centimetres across, serves as the inner lintel of the lower window in the west gable, meaning a name carved perhaps fifteen hundred years ago has spent centuries quietly holding up a window frame.
The stone was identified in 1851 by G. V. du Noyer, and the inscription was subsequently read by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister in 1907 as VORTIGURN, a personal name in the ogham alphabet. Whether the inscription continues beyond that name remains uncertain; the surrounding masonry may well be concealing further characters. That uncertainty deepened on Macalister's return visit in 1938, when he found the west wall smothered under what he described as a dense mass of ivy, which entirely obscured the stone and its inscription. It is a quietly odd situation: a name that survived the early medieval period, the Christianisation of Ireland, and centuries of weather, only to be temporarily defeated by a climbing plant. The stone has since been examined as part of the Ogham in 3D project, run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses photogrammetry to document ogham inscriptions in fine detail regardless of what the surface conditions might otherwise hide.