The ogham stones: names carved across Ireland, Wales and Scotland

In County Kerry, along country lanes and in old graveyards, one comes across stone slabs with rows of notches along their edges. They are the ogham stones, the oldest monuments of Irish writing. Some four hundred are known, the great majority in Ireland, especially in Counties Kerry, Cork and Waterford, and the rest in Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Devon.

Short formulas, family names

Ogham inscriptions are almost always very short and repeat a few formulas. The commonest links two names with the word MAQI, son of: so-and-so son of so-and-so. Sometimes AVI appears, grandson or descendant, or MUCOI, which indicates membership of a kin group or family line. The name is written in the genitive, as if the stone said “of X, son of Y”, perhaps implying the grave or the monument.

The stones mostly date from the period between the fourth and sixth centuries, before the Latin alphabet spread with the monasteries. Many probably marked burials; others may have marked out property or territory. The language of the inscriptions, Primitive Irish, preserves endings that have already disappeared in later manuscript texts, and it is therefore precious to historians of the language.

The bilingual stones of Wales

In Wales, where groups of Irish origin settled in the early medieval centuries, many stones carry an inscription in Ogham alongside one in Latin. A famous example is the Voteporix stone, found at Castell Dwyran in Carmarthenshire and now in Carmarthen museum. The Latin text commemorates a Voteporix “protector”, and the Ogham gives the same name in its Irish form. Many identify this figure with King Vortiporius, criticised by the writer Gildas in the sixth century.

These very bilingual inscriptions were decisive for the modern understanding of Ogham. By comparing the Latin, already known, with the corresponding notches, nineteenth-century antiquaries were able to check the letter values described in the medieval Irish treatises. The Sagranus stone at St Dogmaels, in Pembrokeshire, played an important part in this work of verification.

From Christian crosses to Pictish Scotland

Some ogham stones were reused or altered in Christian times: incised crosses were added, or they were built into churches as building material. At Coolmagort, in the Gap of Dunloe in Kerry, a group of stones was discovered in the nineteenth century in the roof of an underground passage, a souterrain, where they had been reused as roofing slabs.

In Scotland Ogham was also adopted by the Picts, the people of the east and north of the country. Their inscriptions, later and often accompanied by the mysterious Pictish symbols, remain largely undeciphered, because the language they record is poorly known. The letters can be read, but the words are not always understood.

Today many stones are in museums, such as the collection of University College Cork, while others remain in the fields where they were raised. They are silent but eloquent witnesses: names of men, of fathers and of kin groups that, through a few notches, have crossed fifteen centuries. In them writing tells no stories, but asserts an identity and a presence.