Ogham stone, Knockshanawee, Co. Cork

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Knockshanawee, Co. Cork

Sometime in early medieval Ireland, a stone carved with an inscription honouring the dead was pulled from its original context and pressed into service as a roof slab for an underground passage.

It was not alone: six ogham stones in total were used as structural material for a souterrain at Knockshanawee in County Cork, their carefully notched edges turned inward against the earth. Ogham is an early Irish script in which letters are encoded as groups of scored lines cut along the edge of a stone, typically to record a person's name and lineage, and the stones were most likely funerary or commemorative monuments before being repurposed as convenient building material, probably during the early medieval period. The particular stone described here, measuring 1.9 metres long and roughly 0.4 by 0.3 metres in cross-section, served as the seventh lintel in that underground structure.

The souterrain was discovered in 1910, and the stones were subsequently removed and brought to University College Cork, where they remain on permanent display in the Stone Corridor. The inscription on this stone has been examined by three separate scholars across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Power read it in 1932, Macalister in 1945, and McManus in 2004, and all three arrived at broadly the same reading: BRANI MAQQi Mu[C]C..., a partial formula that likely recorded a personal name, Bran, followed by MAQQi, the ogham word for "son of", and the beginning of a father's name or kindred designation that has since been lost or obscured. Macalister also noted traces of additional scores further down the right-hand angle, which he tentatively read as R[A]L, though these remain uncertain. The bracketed letters throughout the transcription indicate characters that are damaged or only partially legible.

The Stone Corridor at UCC brings together a remarkable concentration of these inscribed stones, and the Knockshanawee group can be viewed there as a collection. Seeing them in that context, knowing they once formed the walls and ceiling of a dark underground chamber, adds something to the reading of their half-legible names.

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