Ogham stone, Caolmhagh Mór, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Caolmhagh Mór, Co. Cork

Standing in rough grazing land just below the crest of a ridge in County Cork, this sandstone pillar carries an inscription that has been slowly losing its legibility for centuries.

The stone is 1.3 metres tall and relatively slender, leaning gently to the east, the kind of ancient upright that a person might walk past without registering its significance. What marks it out is the ogham carved along its edge, ogham being the early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along a central stemline, most commonly found on standing stones across Munster and Wales.

The scholar R. A. S. Macalister examined the inscription and published his findings in 1907, returning to it again in his comprehensive 1945 corpus of ogham inscriptions. By his reading, the worn text runs ASsiCONa, though he noted uncertainty around the lower-case letters, meaning the middle portion of the name remained ambiguous even to a careful eye. The inscription most likely records a personal name, as is typical of ogham stones, which were generally erected as memorial or territorial markers during the early centuries of the first millennium. The gradual south-facing slope on which the stone stands would have made it reasonably visible across the surrounding landscape, which may well have been the point.

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