At Knockshanawee in County Cork, a group of ogham stones, the earliest form of writing in Ireland, were repurposed as structural components in a souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement. These stones, carved with their distinctive notched and scored alphabets along the edges, were pressed into service as lintels, the horizontal slabs laid across the top of a passage. It is the kind of fate that tells you something about how communities in early medieval Ireland related to the physical remnants of their predecessors, sometimes with reverence, sometimes with pragmatism.

The stone from Knockshanawee now held at University College Cork was the eighth lintel in that souterrain, a substantial slab measuring 1.8 metres long and roughly 0.8 metres by 0.25 metres in cross-section, though its top is missing. It was one of six ogham stones found together when the souterrain was discovered in 1910. The surviving inscription has generated some disagreement among scholars. Power, writing in 1932, and McManus, in 2004, read the legible portion as COLLI, while Macalister, in his 1945 corpus of ogham inscriptions, preferred COLLOS. The difference matters because ogham inscriptions of this period typically record personal names in a formulaic genitive construction, so the exact letters can shift the identification of whose name is being commemorated. Whether COLLI or COLLOS, the fragment almost certainly preserves part of a proper name, now incomplete along with the stone itself.

All six stones from the Knockshanawee souterrain were removed to University College Cork following their discovery and are now on permanent display in the Stone Corridor, a dedicated collection that makes Cork one of the better places in Ireland to see ogham stones without venturing into a field. The Knockshanawee stone sits among that group, its inscription legible if you know where to look along the edge, carrying the remnant of a name that someone thought worth carving, long before anyone thought to use the stone as a roof.