Ogham stone, Glashaboy, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Stone Monuments
In a pasture on an east-facing slope near Glashaboy in County Cork, there is, according to the records, an ogham stone.
The difficulty is that nobody can see it. No visible surface trace remains, and the original documentation offers almost nothing beyond the bare fact of its existence, leaving behind one of those quietly frustrating entries that is more absence than monument.
Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a standing stone, and the surviving examples across Ireland and Britain represent some of the oldest written Irish in the world. The Glashaboy stone was recorded by University College Cork, cited in Power et al. (1994), but whatever detail might once have accompanied that identification has not survived in any accessible form. The stone itself may be buried, removed, broken up for a field boundary, or simply lying face-down in the grass after centuries of agricultural activity. That kind of loss is not unusual; many ogham stones recorded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have since been absorbed into the landscape in one way or another.