Somewhere in the garden of Comeragh Lodge in County Waterford, a stone roughly the height of a tall person stands with an inscription that almost nobody passing the gate would recognise. It is an ogham stone, carved with the earliest form of written Irish, a script that runs in notches and strokes along the edges of upright stones and dates to roughly the fourth to seventh centuries AD. This one measures 1.45 metres in length and carries a message that has been partly legible for over a century, partly not.

The stone was originally found in the Knockalafalla-Rathgormuck area, a few kilometres from where it now rests, and was recorded in the late nineteenth century by Barry and Cochrane before the great cataloguer of ogham, R.A.S. Macalister, took his turn at reading it in 1945. His reading, careful but incomplete, ran as LUGUDI MAQI L...D...QA MOCOI DONM(A), where the gaps and brackets signal letters that had been worn away or were too ambiguous to commit to. The formula is typical of early Irish memorial inscriptions: MAQI means "son of" in the genitive case of Old Irish, and MOCOI indicates tribal or kindred affiliation. So the stone is, in essence, a genealogical declaration, naming a man called Lugud, placing him within a lineage, and connecting him to a group whose name survives only in fragments. The name of the kindred, rendered by Macalister as DONM(A), trails off into uncertainty. Ogham stones of this kind were almost certainly funerary markers, set up to assert identity and descent at a time when such things were encoded in stone because the communities that raised them had no other durable writing.