Provenance
Discovery: The stone was discovered buried deeply on the south side of St Martin’s churchyard at Lewannick by Langdon in 1892 and the inscriptions were later published by Langdon and Allen in 1895.
Findspot: Lewannick, Cornwall, England (National Grid Reference: SX 2760 8070)
Last recorded location(s): Re-erected, the stone’s current location is a few metres west of the lych-gate in St Martin’s Churchyard, where it was examined and 3D recorded for the OG(H)AM project in April 2024.
Support
Historic Environment Record ID: HER Number: 17590
Object type: Pillar
Material: Granite
Dimensions: H 1.30 × W 0.42 × D 0.25 m
Condition: A slightly broken and exceptionally worn, red granite stone bearing bilingual inscriptions. The ogham inscription (1) is so weatherworn that it is ‘now illegible’ (Okasha 1993, 146) and covered by thick lichen growth. The Latin inscription (2) is ‘incomplete and highly deteriorated’ (Okasha 1993, 146).
Inscription
Text field: The ogham inscription (1) ‘is incised vertically on the edge between the face and the left-hand side of the stone’ (Okasha 1993, 146). The Latin inscription (2) consists of four lines reading horizontally on the face of the stone.
Letters: Macalister (1945, 443-444) surmised that the ogham inscription (1) was ‘probably pocked on the stone, but it is in very bad condition, and the technical details cannot be determined with certainty’. Okasha (1993, 146) noted that the Latin inscription (2) was ‘inscribed without framing-lines or panels’. The Latin letters measure from 5 to 8 cm.
Date: Fifth century or possibly early sixth century
Edition
Ogham text: ᚔ̣ᚌᚓᚅᚐᚃᚔ vac.
Transcription: ỊGENAVI vac. MEMOṚ
Critical apparatus:
- Although the stone is very worn, using the captured 3d data it was possible to identify traces of almost all the ogham letters read by Macalister (1945, 443-444). Of the name IGENAVI, the initial I is partly buried in the ground and the G and N are only partially legible but not really in doubt. There appears to be a space left between the two words. In the second word the final R is especially unclear. 2. The horizontally written Latin inscription (2) is a feature usually associated elsewhere in Britain either with an early date or (sometimes) an ecclesiastical context.
Translation
Ogham and Roman: the memorial of Ingenuus
Commentary
Ingenuus is a Latin name which comes from a legal term for someone free-born (rather than manumitted from legal slavery).
The spelling of the ogham (1), with G for the sound /ŋg/, shows that it is not simply a calque on the written Latin, but is an independent spelling of how it sounded to Irish ears. As Sims-Williams (2003, 221) points out, it also shows that the value ‘NG’ given for the character [ᚍ] must have been a later accretion. If it were available at the time, this value would have been the perfect time to use it. The Latin word memoria is found frequently in Continental palaeo-Christian inscriptions of late fourth century onwards, and also occurs on the famous Voteporix stone from Castell Dwyran, Carmarthenshire (CIIC 358) and at Yarrow, Selkirkshire (CIIC 492). The word was adopted into Irish (memra, mebair). Palaeographically, Tedeschi suggests a date in the fifth century (2005, 242) but acknowledges that linguistic dating points a bit later (Sims-Williams 2003, 361), so possibly early 6th century.
References
- Macalister 1945, 443-444, no. 466
- Okasha 1993, 146-149, no. 23
- Sims-Williams 2003, 221, 361
- Tedeschi 2005, 242