While weeding his garden, a man in England stumbled across a stone inscribed with a 1,600-year-old message written in a rare Irish alphabet. Its discovery was quite a surprise, especially since archaeologists are unable to explain how the stone got to the central English city of Coventry.
Initially, the inscription appears to be a bunch of random vertical lines cut into the stone, which is about the size of a chocolate bar.
However, the lines were actually carved in ogham, an alphabet used to write the early Irish language after the fourth century. From the sixth to ninth centuries, it was used to write Old Irish.
The stone may have been a commemorative object that Irish Christian monks carried on a mission to convert the pagan Mercians in the region. It could have also been used to introduce a traveling Irish merchant to others.
“There’s a lot of possibilities as to why it came over,” said Teresa Gilmore, an archaeologist at the Birmingham Museums Trust. “This is one of the things about some of the amazing finds that turn up—they often create more questions than answers.”
Gilmore learned about the stone’s existence in 2020 after a geography teacher named Graham Senior found it in a flowerbed in his garden during the COVID lockdown. He contacted the Portable Antiquities Scheme, a program that documents historical artifacts discovered in England and Wales.
Thorough investigations of the stone revealed that the lines engraved on it were an inscription in an early style of ogham. Katherine Forsyth, a historian from the University of Glasgow, confirmed the find and took photographs of the stone to create a digital three-dimensional model of it. Part of the inscription was translated as “Maldumcail/ S/ Lass.”
The first word relates to a person’s name, “Mael Dumcail.” The meaning of the rest is still unclear. The object is made of sandstone. It is four inches long and weighs about five ounces. The lines of the inscription were chiseled into three of the corners between the faces of the stone.
Before the introduction of vellum (prepared animal skin), parchment (prepared sheepskin), and paper, it was a common method of writing ogham.
Daisy Daisy – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person
Ogham somewhat resembles Norse runes, which are also made up of straight lines. However, ogham only uses parallel lines in groups of up to five. It appeared to have been developed independently to write in Irish.
Eventually, the Insular script replaced ogham. Insular script was a medieval alphabet that was once widespread across Britain and was primarily used for writing Latin.
There are 400 known ogham inscriptions and just 10 have been found in England, making the discovery rare. Most were from Ireland, but others were from Celtic regions of Britain, like Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall.
Senior decided to donate the ogham stone to the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry. It will remain on display until April 2025.
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