Ogham stone (present location), Cork City, Co. Cork
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Stone Monuments
Fifteen ogham stones found in a single underground chamber is an unusual enough discovery; that all fifteen came from one souterrain inside a ringfort at Ballyknock North in County Cork makes the site one of the more remarkable concentrations of early medieval inscribed stone in Ireland.
This particular stone, now on permanent display in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork, is one of that group, and carries an inscription that is both clear and frustratingly incomplete.
Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved along the edge of a standing stone as a series of notches and lines, most often recording a personal name in a formula meaning roughly "X, son of Y". The souterrain in which these stones were found, a type of underground stone-lined passage associated with ringforts and often used for storage or refuge, had effectively preserved them for centuries. The inscription on this stone was read by R. A. S. Macalister in 1945 and again by Damian McManus in 2004, both arriving at the same partial reading: ACTO MAQI [....] MAGO. The middle section is lost to a lacuna, a gap caused by chipping in the stone, large enough to have held somewhere between eight and ten scores. What name once occupied that gap, and whose ancestry the full inscription recorded, remains unknown.
The Stone Corridor at UCC is accessible to visitors and holds several ogham stones from across Cork and Kerry, making it one of the more quietly remarkable places to encounter this script at close range. This stone sits among that collection, its bold but damaged lettering a reminder that even the most durable inscriptions are subject to the ordinary violence of time.