Ogham stone, Dromore, Co. Waterford

At the old burial ground of Cill Tire near Dromore in County Waterford, two early medieval inscribed stones have been pressed into service as ordinary building material, mortared into a graveyard wall as though they were unremarkable pieces of rubble. One of them is anything but. A slab of slate threaded with conspicuous quartz veins, measuring roughly 1.3 metres tall and just over half a metre wide, it carries a line of ogham script, the ancient Irish writing system that uses a series of notches and strokes cut along a central stemline, most commonly found on standing stones dating from roughly the fourth to the seventh centuries AD.

The inscription on this stone was read by R. A. S. Macalister, the prolific cataloguer of ogham stones whose 1945 corpus remains a foundational reference, as COLLABOT MUCOI LUGA MAQI LOBACCONA. The formula is characteristic of the genre: maqi means "son of" in Old Irish, and mucoi is a term associated with tribal or ancestral descent. The inscription records, in other words, a lineage, the kind of memorial declaration that families and communities used to anchor a name to a landscape. Macalister assigned it catalogue number 266. More recently, the stone has 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 and digital scanning to capture and reanalyse these often worn and ambiguous inscriptions with fresh precision.

The two stones sit within the wall of Cill Tire, a site whose name suggests an early ecclesiastical foundation, "cill" being the Irish word for a church or cell. That such inscribed stones ended up as wall-fill is not unusual; across Ireland, ogham stones were frequently reused in later construction, their original meaning either forgotten or considered less important than the need for a good flat stone. This one, at least, is now protected under a preservation order, which means its future inside that wall is rather more secure than its distant past.