Ogham stone, Rusheens, Co. Mayo

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Stone Monuments

Ogham stone, Rusheens, Co. Mayo

At some point, someone decided that an ancient inscribed standing stone would make a perfectly adequate kneeling-stone for a holy well.

That repurposing, mundane in its practicality and cavalier with whatever the stone originally meant, is what makes the ogham stone at Rusheens quietly remarkable. It now stands upright on a circular, altar-like platform of coursed boulders, roughly 1.28 metres tall and square in cross-section, tapering slightly towards a fissured top, set in concrete and mottled all over with lichen. The ogham inscription, running down the NE angle of the stone for about 0.8 metres from the top, is still legible, though the stone's top is fractured and the inscription was cut short long before the fracture happened.

Ogham is an early medieval Irish script, typically carved along the edge or angle of a stone as a series of notches and strokes, most often recording a personal name in a formulaic genealogical phrase. The scholar R. A. S. Macalister, writing in 1945, read the Rusheens inscription as ALATTOS MAQI BR, the beginning of what would conventionally mean something like "Alattos, son of Br[...]", with the patronymic name incomplete. Macalister believed the fracture across the top of the stone, which severs the inscription, was deliberate, carried out by the masons who built the low enclosing wall around the well dedicated to St Mobhi, into which the stone was then incorporated as a kneeling-stone for pilgrims. He also noted a solitary vowel notch surviving on the opposite angle near the top, possibly a remnant of a second inscription or a continuation. At a later date, the stone was removed from the well wall and repositioned upright on its present platform, two metres to the north of the well. That well, the church and graveyard roughly 250 metres to the southeast, and the possible ecclesiastical enclosure called Killerrikeen about 240 metres to the west together suggest that this damp corner of County Mayo was once a considerably busier sacred landscape than it appears today, a field of rough rush-grown pasture on a low rise.

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