Its inscription is in an Insular Celtic language, identified by the Inscribed Stones Project at UCL as "partly-Latinized Primitive Irish",[3] and comes from a period several decades after the collapse of Roman authority in Roman Britain, when Irish raiders had begun to make permanent settlements in South Wales and south-western Britain.[2] The text reads:[1] CVNORIX | MACVSM/A | QVICO[L]I[N]E, traditionally normalised as Cunorix macus Maqui Coline and translated as Cunorīx son of Maqqos Colinī, where Cunorīx and Maqqos Colinī are personal names.[1][3]Cunorīx, literally meaning 'hound-king', is a well attested Celtic name,[1] and may relate to the etymology of the name of Cynric of Wessex, a 6th-century king.[4][5]Maqui Coline was read by Kenneth H. Jackson as a rendering of Primitive Irish *Maqqī-Colinī (genitive of *Maqqos-Colinī); this name literally means 'son of holly', but is an example of a type of name fashionable in early Irish that, despite looking like patronyms, were in fact given names. It is one of a number of such names that include words for trees and is attested in later Old Irish in the form Macc-Cuilinn.[1]
^Patrick Sims-Williams, 'The Settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle', Anglo-Saxon England, 12 (1983), 1–41, doi:10.1017/s0263675100003331 (p. 30 n. 131).
