The medieval parish church of Seskinan at Knockboy, County Waterford, contains not one but seven ogham stones, and the remarkable thing is how casually most of them have been put to work. Six have been repurposed as building material, slotted in mainly as lintels, their ancient inscriptions quite literally holding up the architecture. The seventh stands in the corner of the church, upright and original in posture if not in context. It is a peculiar kind of survival: writing meant to commemorate the dead, pressed into service as structural timber.

Ogham is an early medieval Irish script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along the edge of a stone, typically to record a person's name and ancestry. The stone in question here serves as the lintel over the window at the eastern end of the south wall, measuring roughly 1.32 metres long and 0.23 metres wide. It was identified in 1851 by the geologist and antiquarian G. V. du Noyer, one of several nineteenth-century figures who systematically documented Ireland's ogham monuments before many were lost or further disturbed. The inscription is damaged, and when the scholar R. A. S. Macalister examined it for his comprehensive 1945 catalogue, he could recover only a fragmentary reading: the partial sequence rendered as ]RG[...]BRCEN[, suggesting a personal name now beyond full recovery. The stone has since been examined as part of the Ogham in 3D project, run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which uses digital scanning to capture inscriptions that the naked eye can no longer read with confidence.