Ogham stone, An Tseanchluain, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
At An Tseanchluain in County Cork, three ogham stones flank a low cairn that marks a penitential station, a site where pilgrims would traditionally perform acts of devotion or penance.
That arrangement alone is unusual enough, but tradition holds that there were once four such stones here, making the present trio a partial survival of something already ancient by the time anyone thought to record it. Ogham is an early medieval script, most commonly carved along the edge of a standing stone as a series of notches and lines, and it was used primarily in Ireland between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries to record personal names, often in memorial inscriptions.
The stone on the east-south-east side of the cairn stands 1.1 metres tall, held upright with packing stones at its base, and measures roughly 25 by 16 centimetres in cross-section. Its inscription runs up one edge and continues down another, a feature that suggests the carver had more to say than a single edge could accommodate. R. A. S. Macalister, who catalogued ogham stones across Ireland in his 1945 corpus, read the inscription as LITUBIRI MAQI QECIA. In ogham, MAQI is the genitive form of a word meaning son, so the formula translates broadly as something like Litubiri, son of Qecia, a naming pattern typical of early Irish memorial stones. M. J. O'Kelly, revisiting the site in 1952, confirmed the opening name Litubiri but noted that the remainder of the inscription had become difficult to make out, the later characters worn or obscured beyond easy reading.