Ogham stone, Seemochuda, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Stone Monuments
Somewhere in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork, among a collection of early medieval inscribed slabs, stands a flat sandstone slab that was not always a museum exhibit. It began its life, or at least its commemorative life, in County Waterford, propped against a leacht at a place called Seemochuda. A leacht is a low cairn or monumental heap of stones, often associated with a holy person or a place of veneration, and the removal of an ogham stone from such a setting is a reminder of how often these objects have travelled far from their original context.
Ogham is an early Irish script, typically carved along the edge of a stone as a series of notches and lines, and used primarily between the fourth and seventh centuries to record names, often in a formulaic pattern identifying a person and their parentage. This stone, measuring 1.37 metres in length and relatively slender at 0.38 by 0.15 metres, carries an inscription that has been read by the scholar R.A.S. Macalister in 1945 and subsequently by Damian McManus in 2004 as ERCAGNI MA[QI] E[R]CIAS, meaning roughly "of Ercagnas, son of Ercias". The square brackets indicate letters that are damaged or uncertain, but the general reading is consistent across both scholars. The formula MAQI, meaning "son of", is one of the most common constructions in ogham inscriptions and marks this stone as a conventional memorial of its type, even if the individuals it names are otherwise unknown to history.
The stone is on permanent display in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork, which holds one of the largest collections of ogham stones in the world. Visitors to the corridor can see it alongside dozens of other inscribed stones, many of them similarly displaced from their original Munster locations.