Church, Tooracurragh, Co. Waterford

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Church, Tooracurragh, Co. Waterford

What was once a church is now little more than a low grass-covered mound on a gentle north-facing slope in Tooracurragh, County Waterford. Half a metre high and roughly twenty metres across, it sits within an oval enclosure defined by curved and straightened field banks, a low scarp, and an outer berm, the ghostly outline of a boundary that once marked this out as sacred ground. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1840 still recorded a recognisable rectangular embanked enclosure here, roughly forty metres north to south and twenty-five metres east to west, set within a larger subrectangular field. In the intervening decades, the structure has all but dissolved back into the landscape.

The site is classified as an early ecclesiastical site, suggesting origins somewhere in the early medieval period of Irish Christianity, though the most arresting detail associated with it is now elsewhere. An ogham stone, ogham being an early medieval script in which letters are encoded as notches and strokes along a central line, was removed from the central structure around 1880 and taken to a nearby farmhouse. The inscription on it has been read as DOMOKI, a personal name in the genitive case of the kind typically found on memorial stones of the period. R. A. S. Macalister, who catalogued ogham inscriptions across Ireland and Britain in his 1945 work, recorded it in that corpus. Earlier notice had been taken of it by the Reverend P. Power, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1923, and by P. Lyons, who discussed it in a 1946 piece on what he called "the stone of Formach" in the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society. The displaced stone, sitting in a farmhouse rather than in any museum or monument, is a reminder of how casually significant objects were sometimes relocated in the nineteenth century, often as curiosities rather than out of any particular malice.

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