Ogham stone, Ballyquin, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Stone Monuments
Standing just inside a field gateway on a broad Waterford hill, this conglomerate standing stone is easy enough to pass without registering what it carries. It rises 2.5 metres, with a pointed top and a rectangular cross-section roughly half a metre wide, and along its south-western edge runs a sequence of notches and scores that form an ogham inscription. Ogham is an early medieval script, most commonly found in Ireland, in which letters are encoded as groups of strokes cut along the edge or face of a stone, typically reading upward. The inscription here has been read as CATABAR MOCO VIRICORB, a formula that names an individual and their tribal or dynastic affiliation, of a type associated broadly with the early Christian centuries.
The reading comes from R. A. S. Macalister, whose 1945 corpus of Irish ogham stones remains a foundational reference despite later revisions to some of his interpretations. The name CATABAR is a personal name, while MOCO, a variant of the formula MAQI MUCOI, typically indicates descent from or membership of a named group, in this case VIRICORB. The stone's northern end shows an irregular profile attributed to ancient damage, which may account for any difficulty in recovering the full sequence of the inscription. Not far away, a souterrain was discovered, adding to the sense that this was once a place of some local significance. A souterrain is an underground stone-built passage or chamber, usually associated with early medieval settlement, sometimes used for storage or refuge. The proximity of the two features, stone and souterrain, suggests activity in the same general period, though the relationship between them is not precisely documented.