Ogham stone, Colbinstown, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Stone Monuments
Most ogham stones carry personal names, genealogies, or memorial formulae running the full length of the stone in the distinctive notched script developed in early medieval Ireland. This one, a compact block of granite unearthed from the south-south-west side of a burial mound at Killeen Cormac in County Kildare, carries just two letters: UR. Whether that represents a fragment of something longer, a name reduced to its opening syllables, or something else entirely, is not recorded.
Ogham is an alphabet rendered in strokes and notches cut along the edge or face of a stone, most commonly used between roughly the fourth and seventh centuries to record names in early Irish or, occasionally, Latin. The stone here is modest in size, approximately 34 by 48 by 38 centimetres, and was one of seven ogham stones documented at the Killeen Cormac burial ground by the epigrapher R. A. S. Macalister, whose 1945 corpus of Irish ogham inscriptions remains a foundational reference for the field. The two bold scores spelling UR were noted as unusually large and clear relative to the stone's small dimensions, which makes the brevity of the inscription all the stranger.
