Ogham stone, Boleycarrigeen, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Stone Monuments
A single word survives on this small Wicklow stone, carved in one of the oldest writing systems found in Ireland.
The inscription reads VOTI, a name or genitive form rendered in ogham, the early medieval script in which letters are represented by groups of notches and lines cut along a central stem edge. The stone itself is modest in size, measuring 0.76 metres tall and roughly 30 centimetres across, yet it carries the kind of quiet significance that comes from great age and from having been found somewhere unexpected.
The stone was discovered by L. Price, a district justice with a known interest in Irish antiquities, embedded in the rampart of a ringfort in the townland of Crossoona, where it had presumably been reused as building material at some point after its original erection. Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures defined by earthen or stone banks, were the dominant form of rural settlement in early medieval Ireland, and it was not unusual for older standing stones to be incorporated into their construction. Macalister catalogued the stone in 1945, assigning it the number 50 in his corpus of ogham inscriptions. The single word VOTI is likely a personal name in the genitive case, meaning something along the lines of "of Votus" or "belonging to Vot", a formula common to commemorative ogham stones across Ireland and Wales. The stone now sits on a south-east facing slope within forestry, and has since been digitally recorded as part of the Ogham in 3D project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which produces high-resolution three-dimensional models of inscribed stones from across the Irish and British Isles.