Ferguson — On the Calkin Ogham Inscription. 167 



the descent at the western part of the mountain there is hut one cottage. 

 What chiefly impresses the mind, having regard to the site of the 

 inscribed stone, lying aslant on the hanging brow of the hill, is the 

 absence of any appearance of a sepulchral character. It obviously has 

 never been intended to stand upright ; and the position seems so little 

 suitable to a grave to which a level flag-stone should be accommodated, 

 that one cannot help speculating on the probability of the stone having 

 been selected with a view to its erection elsewhere, and, after being 

 engraved in situ, left derelict. But this idea is quite displaced by 

 the facts stated by Mr. O'Looney as well as by the common consent of 

 the country people, who all call it Leaba Conain pronounced Conoin. 

 One man over sixty years of age assured me he had heard it so called 

 by his father, an old man when he was a youth, and that such has always 

 been the common voice of the country. It is known by no other name, 

 so far as I could learn, but Leaba Conoin, " Conan's bed," or grave. 

 When we consider the difficulty of inducing Irish-speaking people to take 

 up with novel names in their own language, we are furnished with another 

 strong dissuasion against fancying — whatever we may think of the inscrip- 

 tion — that the story of the grave of some one called Conan, being there, is 

 a fabrication foisted on the acute people of the country, and adopted by 

 them into their own language within a hundred years of our own time. 

 What, I suppose, would next strike the mind of an observer comparing the 

 present appearance of the stone with that of Mr. Burton Conyngham'8 

 drawing of it, would be, that the oblique fracture at the end is the 

 same that he has represented. It must have existed before the flag 

 was split in two, for it cuts equally across the upper and the lower slabs. 

 Now it will be observed that the inscription is contained within a 

 species of long panel, which is complete at the western end, but imper- 

 fect where the cross fracture cuts it off at the other extremity. The 

 inscription obviously has extended beyond the line of fracture, 

 Assuming the last word to be an adjective, like " colgac," which 

 precedes it, there must have been at least one group more of four 

 digits above the medial line. But O'I'lanagan represents it as a com- 

 plete cartouche, enclosing Mr. Conyngham's drawing, and defining the 

 limits of his text at both ends : a very possible mistake for a draftsman 

 to fall into on paper, considering the worn and obscure character of the 

 surface, but the actual state of things is thelastkind of arrangement that a 

 fabricator would have designed in aid of a theory requiring a definite 

 termination to the line of characters. 



But the best defined turning-point, even if it existed, would be of no 

 avail if the antecedent portion of the legend do not supply the needful 

 number of digits to evolve the predetermined combinations in the back 

 reading ; and, in point of fact, if 0' Flanagan was party to this forgery, 

 he has dislocated all his back-reading, by the insertion of a digit too many. 

 The drawing annexed to his paper shows 78 digits; his final reading 

 requires 79 ; the stone actuallypresents 80, and obviouslyhas borne more. 

 But, although the agreement in number is closely approximate, and in his 

 first reading is complete, on comparing digit with digit there appears a 



