486 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 
(in the sense of uninscribed) monumental stone, such as the flag in 
question. Cormac’s Glossary, however, derives the word 5olldn 
differently. 
No doubt the fragments of pottery found beneath the stone were 
fragments of the cinerary urn that held the ashes of the pagan 
chieftain whose mutilated name the stone still bears. Doubtless, 
too, the spot where headstone and shattered urn together lay was that 
chieftain’s grave. From the contiguity of the pagan monument to 
the parochial boundary, one might speculate on the probability that 
in time the monument became a landmark, and was such to the 
earliest builders of the boundary ditch. Further, as these builders 
did not run their ditch over the pagan’s grave, nor left the grave to 
their sunless left, but to their honoured right, it looks as if they 
too were pagan, and the ditch a civil or political boundary at first, 
though afterwards utilized for ecclesiastical purposes, when tuaths 
became parishes. However that may be, we may not suspect these 
builders of being the Vandals by whom, in a vain search for gold, 
‘the grave was rifled, the urn broken, the ashes scattered, and the 
headstone prostrated.t 
The inscribed stone is of fine grey sandstone. It is six feet long. 
Its left inscribed face is one foot three inches wide six inches from 
the top, and gradually narrows to eight inches at six inches from the 
bottom. The right inscribed side is four inches wide at six inches 
from the top, and gradually widens to ten inches at the middle, 
whence it narrows to eight inches at a foot from the bottom. The 
left inscribed face of the stone has so scaled away that the long 
scores there are all in the last stage of shallowness, and are nearly 
all in part effaced, though all still unmistakably discernible. Except 
where chipped from violence of ancient date, the right face is smooth. 
Its smoothness might be taken for the polish of the glacial period, 
or of river action, only that the extreme difference of present depth 
of scores one from another at this side shows that here, since the 
first formation of the scores, the surface of the stone has insensibly 
been reduced, in some parts more and in others less, through some 
such cause as atmospheric action, or the rubbing of cattle, or the 
sharpening of weapons. 
There is only one line of inscription. The inscription begins at 
two feet from the bottom ; is two and a-half feet long; ends one and 
a-half foot from the top, and is as follows :— 
po Sat tf WI pte ppp Lo ype 
AP) PO or Aa AG <@) oa .'s) {epi Ae 
(Ai) lola Magi Sdanbi. Of (Ai) lill, son of Sdanb.. 
1Tt may be noted here that at the old castle of Rathcobane, on the same farm 
as Parkadallane, stone implements were found in the present Mr. M‘Grath’s 
father’s time. 
