Leacht, Seemochuda, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Holy Sites & Wells

Leacht, Seemochuda, Co. Waterford

On a small rectangular hillock rising above the ravine of the Araglin River in County Waterford, a clearing in the surrounding coniferous forest marks a site that tradition has associated for centuries with the death and burial of a saint. The hillock, roughly 70 metres by 40 metres at its flat top and rising between one and a half and three metres, is known as Sidh Mochuda, or St Mochuda's Chair, a name that also honours the saint as St Carthage. The visible remains are modest: a rectangular area, approximately 2.5 metres by 1.1 metres, defined by the grass-covered foundations of a low stone wall. Most of the long sides of this wall are now gone, leaving only a ghostly outline in the turf. It is one of those places where the archaeological evidence is thin enough that the weight of meaning rests almost entirely on what people have believed about it for generations.

When the antiquarian Power wrote about the site in 1899, he recorded a small stone-walled enclosure or grave measuring roughly six feet by four feet, with three large stones visible inside. One of those stones was an ogham stone, a type of early medieval monument inscribed with an alphabet of notched and lined characters typically used to record personal names, often in commemoration of the dead. That stone, which was once standing upright at the site, was removed and is now held at University College Cork. It was read by the scholar Macalister in 1945 as bearing the inscription ERCAGNI MAQI ERCIAS, a formula meaning roughly "of Ercagnas, son of Ercias", following the standard ogham convention. The name on the stone does not correspond to any saint, which raises the possibility that the enclosure reused or incorporated an older memorial. Power also noted local knowledge that two further stones, possibly also ogham stones, had at some point been rolled down the hillside into the stream to the west. Neither has been located since.

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