Ogham stone (present location), Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Stone Monuments
An early medieval inscription carved in ogham, the ancient script of notched lines cut along a stone's edge or angle, has ended up a very long way from where it started.
This particular stone, measuring roughly 1.22 metres tall and just over half a metre wide, was originally found built into the fabric of a church wall at Kilmannin, County Mayo, which is where it spent centuries before eventually making its way to a present location in Dublin South City. That kind of displacement is not unusual for ogham stones; they were frequently recycled as handy building material by communities who may have cared little for, or simply no longer read, the inscriptions scratched into their edges.
The stone carries two inscriptions running along its four angles in a boustrophedon arrangement, meaning the text alternates direction, reading up one angle and down the next in the manner of an ox ploughing a field back and forth. The first inscription was read by scholar Damian McManus in 1991 as LUGADDON MAqi LuGUDEC, a personal name formula of the kind common to early ogham stones, effectively recording that a man named Lugaddon was the son of Lugudec. The second inscription has proved more resistant; McManus rendered it as DDISI MO...CQU SEL, while R.A.S. Macalister, who catalogued the stone in 1945, offered the reading DDISIMO [--]CQU[!B]EL, the brackets and punctuation signals indicating letters he considered uncertain or damaged beyond recovery. Neither reading has been fully resolved, which gives the stone an additional layer of quiet intrigue.
The stone is now part of the 'Ogham in 3D' project run by the School of Celtic Studies at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, which has produced detailed digital records of ogham stones across Ireland and beyond. The project's entry for this stone, catalogued as CIIC no. 4 in Macalister's corpus, is freely accessible online at ogham.celt.dias.ie and includes high-resolution imagery that makes the incised angles easier to read than they often are in person. For anyone wanting to go beyond the physical object, that digital record is where the real close examination begins.