230 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



At first sight this is not any more promising than the other readings. 

 But one day, when, in what I might almost describe as an idle moment, I 

 was meditating on this inscription, it occurred to me to write it out in Ogham 

 letters and to turn it upside down; with the surprising result that I found it 

 would invert into the perfectly intelligible sequence CELI TURLEGETTT, 

 " tenant, or follower, of Turlegettios." The word CELI is found on a number 

 of stones inscribed in Ogham ; thus at Whitefield, Co. Kerry, we have 

 ALATTO CELI BATTIGNI. On a damaged stone from Glounagloch, Co. 

 Cork, now in the British Museum, we have MAQI-BRIL . . . CELI 

 ALACENG . . . . ; the ends of the lines being broken, the names are here 

 imperfect. A stone still hidden away in a rath-cave near Donoughniore, 

 Co. Cork, reads, so far as the inscription is exposed, TJDDMENSA CE- 



(li ). And at Drumloghan, Co. Waterford, we have a long inscription 



that reads CUNALEGEA MAQI C . . . . SALAR CELI AVE-QVECEA. 

 The formula of the last is practically identical with the complete Killeen 

 Cormac inscription as now interpreted : OVANOS AVI IVACATTOS CELI 

 TUBLEGETTI — translated in both cases as "A, son (or grandson) of B, 

 follower of C." 



The name TUBLEGETTI, thus recovered, is remarkable, and I have not 

 hit upon anything exactly comparable with it ; but the same is true of the 

 apparently cognate and equally enigmatical name GLUNLEGGET, which 

 undoubtedly occurs on one of the Monataggart stones : here the -i of the 

 genitive case is omitted. This comparison confirms the reading of the 

 ambiguous letter as a G. 



II. 



In the Drumloghan inscription just cited, which affords the closest parallel 

 to the Killeen Cormac stone as thus interpreted, the inscription is written on 

 three angles of the stone, in Ogham throughout. There does not seem to 

 be any very obvious reason why this should not have been done also at 

 Killeen Cormac. No one, I venture to think, can question that the inter- 

 pretation of the inscription now suggested has the advantage over previous 

 renderings in being simple, grammatical, unstrained, and in full accordance 

 with the formulae of analogous monuments elsewhere in Ireland. But a 

 critic has the right to demand an answer to the following questions : — 



(1) Why is the inscription inverted ? 



(2) Why is the Roman character used ? 



(3) Why is one of the letters to be assumed as Greek ? 



In what follows I endeavour to answer these questions, and to indicate 



