Why So Many Ogham Stones Turn Up in Souterrains

If you go looking for an ogham stone today, there’s a decent chance you’ll find it somewhere it was never meant to be. Not toppled in a field near its original site, but built sideways into the roof of an underground passage, propping up a ringfort wall, or holding up a lintel over a church door. Recycled ogham stones like this aren’t a rare oddity. In parts of Munster they’re closer to the norm than stones still standing where they were first carved.

The clearest evidence for this comes from souterrains, the stone-lined underground passages that early medieval Irish farmers built as cold stores, hiding places, or refuges. Builders needed long, flat, ready-cut slabs of stone for roofing, and a carved ogham pillar was exactly that: a rectangular length of stone, already dressed on at least one face. So they used them. Whoever built these passages clearly wasn’t reading the inscriptions, or didn’t care what they said.

Cork’s champion souterrain

The single biggest haul came from Ballyknock North (Baile an Chamhaicigh Thuaidh) in east Cork. In the nineteenth century a local landowner opened up a souterrain inside a ringfort on the farm and found fifteen ogham stones inside, most of them acting as roof lintels. It’s still the largest number of ogham stones ever recovered from a single site anywhere in Ireland or Britain. Thirteen were eventually moved off the farm to University College Cork and Lismore Castle in the early twentieth century, and twelve of those are now on permanent display in UCC’s Stone Corridor. One stone was left behind with the farmer and has since gone missing entirely, last recorded seen in 1907.

Cork as a whole carries this pattern more than anywhere else. Well over half of the county’s surviving ogham stones were first found reused in souterrains, and roughly three-quarters of the twenty-eight pillars now standing in UCC’s Stone Corridor came out of Cork souterrains specifically.

The brothers under Knockshanawee

Not every souterrain gave up its stones by accident. At Knockshanawee (Cnoc Seanmhaí), also in Cork, six ogham stones were deliberately excavated in 1911 when the antiquarian R.A.S. Macalister and Sir Bertram Windle, UCC’s president and first professor of archaeology, dismantled the passage stone by stone. Two of the inscriptions, found lying side by side, both name a father called Luigne, suggesting the men they commemorate were brothers. One of the six, reused as the innermost lintel of the souterrain, is now on display in the Stone Corridor as part of UCC’s “Stories in Stone” exhibition.

Parked by the side of the road

Not every recycled stone stayed underground. Seven ogham pillars were dug out of a collapsed souterrain at Coolmagort (Cúil Má Gort), near Beaufort in Co. Kerry, in 1838. They’d been used as lintels and packing stones in the passage roof, and once the souterrain was gone there was nothing left on the surface to mark where it had been. The Office of Public Works eventually gathered the seven stones, added an eighth found at a nearby church site, and arranged all eight upright in a neat row beside the public road, where they still stand today. They’re usually known now as the Dunloe Ogham Stones, and they’re one of the most visited ogham sites in Kerry precisely because they’re so easy to reach. You can browse more sites like it on our interactive ogham stone map.

Not far away at Rathkenny (Ráth Cionaoith), a fourth Kerry stone was found doing much the same job: positioned centrally as the lintel directly over the entrance chamber of another souterrain.

Churches did it too

Souterrains weren’t the only structures raiding old memorial stones. At Seskinan in Co. Waterford, a medieval parish church built around the late 1300s or early 1400s incorporated ogham stones as internal lintels over most of its windows and one of its two doorways, a reuse first properly recorded by the antiquarian George Victor du Noyer in 1851. Ogham stones have also turned up doing duty as building material in ringfort walls and as floor slabs in other medieval structures.

What the recycling tells us

None of this reuse looks deliberate or hostile. Nobody was smashing ogham stones to erase them. They were simply using convenient pieces of cut stone for a building job, the same way a farmer might use a broken headstone to shore up a gatepost. But that casualness is itself the important clue. As Damian McManus lays out in A Guide to Ogam, the classical period of ogham inscription runs roughly from the fourth to the seventh century. By the time these stones were getting built into souterrain roofs, generally sometime after that window closed, whoever was doing the building either couldn’t read the script anymore or simply didn’t see the stones as memorials worth respecting.

That has a real cost for archaeology today. A stone found reused in a souterrain tells you almost nothing about where it originally stood, who it was raised for, or what territory or grave it once marked. Clusters of ogham stones turning up at church sites or old cave systems often represent nothing more than later collection points, not evidence that the people commemorated had any connection to that spot at all. Working out an ogham stone’s real history means tracing it backward through at least one, and sometimes several, changes of use, long after the person it names was forgotten by everyone except the stone itself. For more on how the script worked in its original context, our guide to ogham’s history and origins is a good place to start.