Inscribed stone (present location), Lissananny, Co. Galway

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Stone Monuments

Inscribed stone (present location), Lissananny, Co. Galway

At Lissananny in County Galway, there is a stone that may or may not be what it was once thought to be.

For years it was logged as an ogham stone, ogham being the early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes carved along the edge of a standing stone. The classification, it turns out, rested on local accounts gathered during survey visits in 1984 and 1990, not on any direct examination of the markings themselves.

Those local accounts described a stone that had already suffered a bleak fate: broken in two, with one half buried in the ground and the other half lost entirely. The so-called ogham markings were never formally verified as genuine, which means the stone cannot be confidently placed in that category at all. It has since been reclassified simply as an inscribed stone, a designation that acknowledges something is there without committing to what it actually says or means. To complicate matters further, the stone in question was supposedly situated around 400 metres to the north-west of the position now recorded for it, suggesting the present location may reflect where a fragment ended up rather than where the original monument stood. What was once a seemingly straightforward entry in the archaeological record has quietly unravelled into something more uncertain, a stone of unknown inscription, partial survival, and disputed provenance, waiting for the kind of close investigation that has not yet come.

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Pete F
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