At Killeen Cormac burial ground near Colbinstown, seven stones carry some of the oldest writing in Ireland. That alone would be remarkable; what makes this particular stone quietly arresting is what survives of its inscription. Once the lichen was cleared away with hydrochloric acid, the carved notches and strokes of ogham script, a system of writing used in Ireland roughly from the fourth to the seventh centuries, gave up a partial reading: [ ….. ]MAQQI COLLABOTA. The opening of the text is lost, but MAQQI, meaning "son of", is one of the most familiar formulas in ogham inscriptions, and COLLABOTA is the name it introduces as a father or ancestor. A pillar stone roughly 1.68 metres tall and 0.38 metres on each side, it stands at the south-western end of the central mound of the burial ground, where it has presumably stood since someone had a name cut into it well over a thousand years ago.

The stone was recorded by R. A. S. Macalister, the Irish archaeologist whose 1945 corpus of ogham inscriptions remains a foundational reference for the field. He catalogued this example as No. III among the Killeen Cormac group, noting its dimensions and what the inscription yielded once the surface was legible. The burial ground itself, known as Killeen Cormac, is the focus of the whole cluster; seven ogham stones associated with a single site is an unusual concentration, suggesting the place held particular significance over a long period. The partial name COLLABOTA does not appear to match any well-known historical figure, which is not unusual; many ogham inscriptions memorialise people whose names have otherwise vanished entirely from the record.