The papers read to the scholars of the Royal Irish Academy are collected in
Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, and Volume 9 (1867) covers, among other years, 1864. It was in fact Monday, November 14, 1864, when Samuel Ferguson read his latest paper on Ogham Inscriptions.
Samuel Ferguson (March 10, 1810 to August 9, 1886) was an Irish poet, and antiquarian, whose interest in Irish mythology predates Yeats. He was Deputy Keeper of Public Records of Ireland, and in 1878 was knighted. His wife was the daughter of the founder of the Guinness Mahon bank
[The paper was concerned with the cave]...310 yards northwest of the ancient sepulchral ... Graveyard of the Kings—a spot marked with the name Owneygat, that is, the Cat's Cave, ...[so-called] because wild cats used to hunt rabbits in it.....
The earliest notices of the cave appear to treat it as a treasury house of Meave .... The same idea still exists among the peasantry of the country, by whom the interior of the cave has been repeatedly explored within the last twenty years, in the hope of finding treasure. Their operations have resulted in the falling in of the earth, which now chokes up the western end of the cave, and renders it impossible to say how far it extends....
This [cave] according to tradition, was the Bank of Ireland in the time of Queen Mab; but if it was, the drops from the Gothic roof of the edifice must have injured the bank notes very much. A truer tradition connected with it is, that one Croghan, a rebel, lived in it after the rebellion,[1798] and by so doing saved his neck from the halter." ....[Literature also refers to a nearby]..fairy community; and ... a person who, for some slight to a fountain fairy, was condemned to a year's residence therein."....
[The cave has been altered and] consists of a natural fissure in the limestone rock, which appears to have been artificially widened, so as to give an average breadth of five feet throughout a distance of about forty yards. This cavern, the floor of which is from fifteen to twenty-five feet under the surface, is connected with the upper chambers, in which the inscriptions exist, by a passage excavated in the rock, and roofed over, as are the external chambers, by long stones, artificially placed, and bonded into the dry stone walls forming the sides of the passages or chambers near the surface....
On examining this cave, on the 30th of September, 1864, the writer observed inscriptions in the Ogham character, on two of the roofing stones of its upper chambers or galleries. Part of the inscription on each stone was built into the structure, so that the stones before being placed must have been already sculptured. Whatever the age of the cave, the inscriptions must, therefore, have at least an equal antiquity....The cave has always, within literary memory, been regarded as of the epoch of Meave, the celebrated Queen of Connaught, who lived about the beginning of the Christian era....
.... In the absence of anything more satisfactory we can, therefore, conclude no more from this object, than that Ogham writing was certainly in use.... before the introduction of Christianity..... [T]he writer desires to ... with regard to the probable age of the cave, and the appearance it presents of having had two entrances, ...[refer] to Keating's tract on "Early Irish Modes of Sepulture,"....and in particular to the old poem there cited :....[the lines translated as]
A grave of one door for a man of science;
A grave of two doors for a woman.
We assume the above article was included in Ferguson's Ogham Inscriptions in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, a book edited by his widow and published in 1887.
Before Ferguson's turn to read, he would have listened as another scholar, Mr. Du Noyer, discuss graveyard inscriptions in County Meath, Westmeath and Longford. And he probably noticed this description which is still poignant, after 150 years:
In the graveyard of Coolamber old church there is a tombstone of the family of Farrell, ..., the earliest date on which is 1799. The crest is a greyhound courant, with an earl's coronet beneath; then there is a lion courant, though, according to another tombstone of the same family, this animal should be rampant; and below all is the following Irish motto, deeply cut in Roman letters :" COO BREI BE DERB" which....translates, "the rushing or tearing hound."
Mr. Samuel Ferguson, read a paper entitled:
In the graveyard of Coolamber old church there is a tombstone of the family of Farrell, ..., the earliest date on which is 1799. The crest is a greyhound courant, with an earl's coronet beneath; then there is a lion courant, though, according to another tombstone of the same family, this animal should be rampant; and below all is the following Irish motto, deeply cut in Roman letters :" COO BREI BE DERB" which....translates, "the rushing or tearing hound."
Mr. Samuel Ferguson, read a paper entitled:
"Account Of Ogham Inscriptions In The Cave At Rathcrog, County Of Roscommon".
We are quoting liberally in honor of the week before St. Patrick's Day.
[The paper was concerned with the cave]...310 yards northwest of the ancient sepulchral ... Graveyard of the Kings—a spot marked with the name Owneygat, that is, the Cat's Cave, ...[so-called] because wild cats used to hunt rabbits in it.....
The earliest notices of the cave appear to treat it as a treasury house of Meave .... The same idea still exists among the peasantry of the country, by whom the interior of the cave has been repeatedly explored within the last twenty years, in the hope of finding treasure. Their operations have resulted in the falling in of the earth, which now chokes up the western end of the cave, and renders it impossible to say how far it extends....
This [cave] according to tradition, was the Bank of Ireland in the time of Queen Mab; but if it was, the drops from the Gothic roof of the edifice must have injured the bank notes very much. A truer tradition connected with it is, that one Croghan, a rebel, lived in it after the rebellion,[1798] and by so doing saved his neck from the halter." ....[Literature also refers to a nearby]..fairy community; and ... a person who, for some slight to a fountain fairy, was condemned to a year's residence therein."....
[The cave has been altered and] consists of a natural fissure in the limestone rock, which appears to have been artificially widened, so as to give an average breadth of five feet throughout a distance of about forty yards. This cavern, the floor of which is from fifteen to twenty-five feet under the surface, is connected with the upper chambers, in which the inscriptions exist, by a passage excavated in the rock, and roofed over, as are the external chambers, by long stones, artificially placed, and bonded into the dry stone walls forming the sides of the passages or chambers near the surface....
On examining this cave, on the 30th of September, 1864, the writer observed inscriptions in the Ogham character, on two of the roofing stones of its upper chambers or galleries. Part of the inscription on each stone was built into the structure, so that the stones before being placed must have been already sculptured. Whatever the age of the cave, the inscriptions must, therefore, have at least an equal antiquity....The cave has always, within literary memory, been regarded as of the epoch of Meave, the celebrated Queen of Connaught, who lived about the beginning of the Christian era....
Before proceeding further....something should be said of the nature of the Ogham writing, and of the existing means for its deciphering. It was a species of cipher, in which straight strokes engraved on monumental stones, by their number and relation to a particular line, ....represented the letters of an alphabet. Facility of engraving with rude implements, rather than a desire for secrecy—for who would desire to commemorate in signs not generally understood ....may have been the original motive for the use of this species of writing. The value of the characters depending on the number of strokes, and these numbers [increase]... in a progressive ratio in sets of five....
With this key, available for the last five hundred years, we may be surprised to find the Ogham character still involved in ... much mystery. This may be, in some measure, accounted for by the discredit brought on the subject by a paper in our own " Transactions,'" at an early period in the history of the Academy, in which a supposed passage from one of the Ossianic poems was adduced in elucidation of an Ogham inscription existing on Callan Mountain, in the county of Clare....It was not till our President undertook the investigation in the character on the scientific principles applicable to cipher-writing in general, that the subject again attracted a philosophic interest.
.... In the absence of anything more satisfactory we can, therefore, conclude no more from this object, than that Ogham writing was certainly in use.... before the introduction of Christianity..... [T]he writer desires to ... with regard to the probable age of the cave, and the appearance it presents of having had two entrances, ...[refer] to Keating's tract on "Early Irish Modes of Sepulture,"....and in particular to the old poem there cited :....[the lines translated as]
A grave of one door for a man of science;
A grave of two doors for a woman.
We assume the above article was included in Ferguson's Ogham Inscriptions in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, a book edited by his widow and published in 1887.
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