A man in England, while weeding in his garden, unexpectedly discovered a 1,600-year-old stone inscribed with an ancient message. It is a rare example of the Ogham alphabet.
Investigations have revealed that the stone features an Ogham inscription, a writing system used by the Irish since the 4th century AD.
At first glance, the script appears as a series of vertical lines carved into a stone about the size of a chocolate bar. However, this is actually an Ogham script, used for writing early Irish from the 4th century and Old Irish from the 6th to the 9th centuries. This discovery has puzzled archaeologists, who cannot explain how this ancient inscription came to be in Coventry, Central England.
The stone and the ancient Ogham inscription found in a garden in Coventry, England. (Photo: Herbert Museum and Art Gallery).
Some believe this could be a souvenir, perhaps carried by Irish Christian missionaries on their mission to convert the pagan Mercians in the area, or an introduction gift from an Irish trader.
Teresa Gilmore, an archaeologist at the Birmingham Museum Trust, stated: “There are many possible explanations for its presence. This is one of the most remarkable discoveries.”
Gilmore is the contact archaeologist for the British Museum’s Portable Antiquities Scheme, which received the stone in 2020.
Geography teacher Graham Senior found the stone while he was weeding in his garden in Coventry during the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. He shared: “I noticed it while clearing away some overgrown vegetation in the garden. At first, I thought it was some kind of calendar. Later, I discovered it was an Ogham stone, and the fact that it is over 1,600 years old is hard to believe.”
Senior contacted the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which records historic items discovered in England and Wales.
Irish Writing
Gilmore’s efforts paid off when historian Katherine Forsyth from the University of Glasgow saw photographs of the stone and confirmed that the markings are an early style of Ogham script.
Gilmore explained that the first part relates to the name of a person – “Mael Dumcail” – but the meaning of the rest is still unknown.
The object is made of sandstone. The carvings are cut at three angles across the faces of the slab. This is a common way of writing in the Ogham style before the advent of parchment and paper.
Ogham shares some similarities with Norse runes, which also consist of straight lines. However, Ogham only uses groups of parallel lines and appears to have developed independently for writing in Irish. Ogham was eventually replaced by Insular script, a medieval alphabet used throughout England, primarily for writing Latin.
This stone is a rare find. Only about 400 Ogham inscriptions are known (compared to thousands of Norse rune inscriptions), and only 10 inscriptions have been found in England.
