Ogham stone (present location), Tooracurragh, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Stone Monuments
Somewhere between a church ruin and a farmyard in County Waterford, a stone bearing one of Ireland's oldest forms of writing has ended up leaning against a domestic outbuilding. It is not where it started out, and that quiet displacement is part of what makes it worth knowing about. The stone in question is a grit slab measuring roughly 1.32 metres tall and just under 40 centimetres wide, and it carries not one but three distinct marks of human intention: an ogham inscription, a cart-wheel design in false relief, and an incised Latin cross.
Ogham is an early medieval script in which letters are represented by series of notches and lines cut along the edge of a stone, most commonly recording personal names. This particular stone was recorded by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister in 1945, who read its inscription as DOMOKI, a name otherwise obscure but suggestive of the kind of commemorative function these stones typically served. The stone was known locally as the 'stone of Formach', a name noted by Lyons in 1946, which implies it carried some memory of an individual even into relatively recent times. It originated at the central structure of the early church site at Tooracurragh, and the presence of both an ogham inscription and a Latin cross on the same stone points to a transitional moment in early Irish Christianity, when older epigraphic traditions were being absorbed into a new religious framework. The cart-wheel design adds a further layer of ambiguity; such decorative motifs are not standard features of ogham stones, making this example somewhat unusual in its combination of elements.
The stone is now held at a farmhouse near the original church site, having been moved from its ecclesiastical context at some point in the past. Visitors to the area who know to look for it will find the Tooracurragh church site itself nearby, but the stone now sits in private agricultural surroundings rather than among the ruins where it once stood.
