Page:Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy vol XXXIII.djvu/555

 Macalisi'kr — Ogham Inscription Discovered ill Co. Wtcklow. 2M belonged to it, is lying on the ground at its foot. These injuries have fortunately done no damage to the inscription. The scores are broad and shallow ; they are all traceable, and most of them easily read, though, as is usual in the case of a granite stone, the surface is much disintegrated. The inscription occupies the left-hand edge of the northern face of the stone, and runs up over the angle at the top. It is quite short, consisting of the following eight letters only:— MAQI NILI The L is at the upper angle of the inscribed edge, and the concluding I is on the top of the stone. There is no sign that the inscription was ever longer; I searched all the angles and the face of the stone carefully, but in vain, for any name to precede maqi. The stone thus commemorates a certain " son of Niall." The name as written is certainly nili, not neli, which is what we might have expected. The fifth score of the i is, however, considerably deeper than the other four (all of which are traceable), and it is not impossible that the writer cut an i in error, and endeavoured to cancel the superfluous score, with the result that he made it all the more emphatic ! The great size of the stone would suggest that we have in it the monu- ment of a person of some importance. Yet the person's name is not given. This anomaly can be explained in one of two ways. (1) That the stone commemorates " The Mac 'SiiW" par excellence, the head of the Clann Neill of his time. The objection to this is two fold. In the first place, the stone is far from any Clann Neill territory. In the second place, this method of nomenclature is hardly old enough, so far as the existing documents permit us to judge, to be found in an Ogham inscription. (2) I therefore reject the foregoing explanation, in favour of the alterna- tive, which is to the effect that the importance of the person commemorated lay not in himself but in his father. Niall was presumably the chief of the district ; the owner of the monument had no claim to renown except through the accident of birth which had made him the chief's son. He may, indeed, have been a mere youth ; and under such circumstances it would not be surprising if he had been commonly spoken of in the district as " Niall's son " rather than by his own insignificant name. We have then to find a chief of the ancient tribe in whose territory the stone is standing— that is, the Ui Mail. The brief genealogical fragments relating to this tribe in the Books of Leinster and of Ballymote, and in the Bodleian ms. Rawl., B 502, give us no help. But on turning to the Annals of the Four Masters we find what we want at once. Niall, son of Aedh Allan,