It’s the size that gets people first. The Ballyboodan Ogham Stone is a block of slate 2.31 m by 1.75 m and 23 cm thick – one of the biggest ogham-inscribed slabs in the country – lying flat in a fenced corner of a field 1.7 km south of Knocktopher. Cut along one edge is the line CORBI KOI MAQI LABRID: ‘Here is Corb, son of Labraid’. Nobody knows who Corb was. The stone is his only trace.
What you’ll actually see – and the honest catch
Set your expectations on the carving before you go. The strokes are weathered and shallow, on the right-hand edge of the slab, and more than one visitor has stood over it squinting to make out anything at all. It is genuinely hard to read – fainter than most of the well-known ogham stones – so the draw here is the sheer scale of the slab and the fact that a 1,200-year-old name is sitting in a roadside ditch, free to walk up to, rather than a crisp inscription you’ll photograph in a glance. Catch it in low, raking sun and the scores show far better; flat midday light flattens them out completely.
Ogham itself is the earliest written form of Irish: an alphabet of lines cut across or beside a central stem, read from the bottom up. The formula on memorial stones is usually ‘X son of Y’, which is exactly what Ballyboodan gives you. It was carved between AD 700 and 900, late in ogham’s life, when Latin script was already taking over.
How it ended up flat
The stone stood upright until the 1840s. Rediscovered around 1841, it was knocked over by treasure-seekers who reckoned something was buried beneath it. In 1850 the tenant of the field wanted rid of it altogether as an obstacle to the plough, and it was the landlord, Sir Hercules Richard Langrishe, 3rd Baronet, who stepped in and saved it. It has lain prostrate ever since, which at least means you read the inscription looking down rather than craning at a pillar. In 2020 it was recorded in 3D as part of the County Kilkenny Heritage Plan, so if the light beats you on the day, there’s a digital model online that shows the carving far more clearly than the naked eye manages in the field.
Visiting
It’s a state-owned National Monument in the care of the OPW, free, and open during daylight hours all year – no staff, no ticket, no opening times. The slab sits in its own timber-framed enclosure on the right-hand side of the road as you come south from Knocktopher.
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Admission | Free |
| Opening hours | Daylight access only |
| Parking | Limited roadside space opposite the enclosure; pull in carefully |
| Facilities | None on site – nearest in Knocktopher or Kilkenny city |
The road is a fast rural stretch with hedge-limited sightlines, so mind the traffic stepping off it, and the grass goes slick after rain. This is an unguided site: the OPW takes no responsibility for accidents, and the kindest thing you can do for the inscription is not run your fingers along the edge, which speeds the wear.
Nearby
If you only stop at one more thing in this corner of south Kilkenny, make it the Kilmogue Portal Tomb (Leac an Scail), a short drive away – one of the tallest dolmens in Ireland and a far more imposing thing to stand under than the ogham slab is to stand over. Kells Priory, the county’s largest monastic ruin with its run of towers along the wall, is about 8 km off. For the full medieval day, Kilkenny Castle and the city are roughly half an hour north.