More and more Ogham stones have been documented since the 1940s, and more continue to be discovered. It is thought that there are about 400 in Britain and Ireland, the majority (330) are found in Ireland. ?

?

The main concentration of Ogham activity is in the south, particularly the southwest, with a clustering in Kerry, stretching out along the southern coast, up through Waterford, Wexford and up to south Wicklow.

?

In Cornwall and Devon, together, there are a dozen stones. England has a single stone known. There are 8 on the Isle of Man. There are 6 in Gaelic Dál Riata Scotland, but 29 found in areas of former Pictish Kingdoms, mainly along the east-coast of Scotland, the Orkneys, and the Shetlands. Uniquely the Pictish stones appear are in a non-Irish in language, the rest are exclusively in primitive Irish, with accompanying Latin alphabet script found in Wales.

?

Undoubtedly Waterford-East Cork has an old dynastic link with Wales and it is suggested by many commentators, including David Stifter from Maynooth, that ‘this connection suggests itself as a channel of transmission for the art of writing between those two countries’. However the direct of travel is impossible to ascertain. The concentration in southwest Ireland might well suggest a west-east source of travel.

?

Stifter also points out that scholars in the early and middle part of the 20th century, including Carney, were inclined to see in Ogham an Irish invention of great antiquity, going back to the 1st century A.D. (e.g. Carney 1975) or even earlier. Whereas the current thinking is that they are a phenomena that belongs to the early 5th Century (Sims-Williams). Harvey argues, given that the majority of Ogham stones belong to the ‘orthodox’ phase of Ogham stone creation, and are overwhelmingly written in primitive Irish, any time between the 1st and 5th century is possible, before the transition to old Irish in the 6^th Century during the ‘Great Upheaval of the Phonological System’.

?

Radio carbon dating is not effective on stone, and neither have the sites been satisfactorily archaeologically investigated. However the archaeological evidence of the Silchester Stone (dating to around 496) supports a late Antiquity origin. It is also noted that the emergence of Ogham could coincide with the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. Swift argues that Ogham was devised as a vernacular counterpart to Latin literacy - a prerequisite for embracing the Christian tradition.

?

Therefore the emergence of ‘orthodox’ Ogham stones in the 4th Century or so (to split the difference) does not coincide with any particular shift in language, which might be expected if Ogham was associated with external settlement into Ireland. ?That being said, however, it is known that Irish, and primitive Irish, was spoken in areas of Irish settlement in Britain, most particularly Wales (especially Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Gwynedd, and Anglesey). As such it is not surprising to find that British Ogham stones have Irish inscriptions. Nevertheless of the 50 or so Ogham inscriptions that are known from the area of Roman Britain only five stones are monolingual Irish. The others are bilingual and usually contain Latin or Old British equivalent versions of the Irish text. This is suggestive of an intermingling of cultures in Britain which is absent in Ireland, and perhaps illustrates that the emergence of Ogham script in Britain is a result of Irish immigration into Britain in Late Antiquity, and not vice versa at an earlier stage.

?

As such, Ogham stones are far too late to be suggestive of any significant settlement into Ireland from Wales after the 1st Century, and Ogham probably emerged in Ireland far later than 250AD. Indeed the opposite might indeed prove the case –Iron Age commemorative standing stones (if that was indeed their purpose) seem to be an Irish phenomenon if one employs the metric of crude statistical clustering.

?

It is arguable that the script itself may have been devised on the island of Britain, and imported into Ireland. Ireland did not exist in splendid isolation. The archaeological evidence, particularly from sites such as Newgrange, clearly establish that from the 1st millennium, there was significant interaction with Roman Britain. The late Professor O’Kelly of UCC used to describe the discovery of Roman coins at Newgrange as evidence of ‘Roman tourists in Ireland’. Subsequent archaeological surveys have found evidence of Roman trading posts in Co. Dublin. As such it is undoubtedly certain that the Irish had come into contact with the Latin alphabet.

?

It is commonly accepted that Ogham script was probably invented by someone, perhaps in Britain. Stifter argues that the uniformity of the writing system from the earliest times, without evidence for a period of experimentation, points to the inventor being a single individual, perhaps familiar with Latin writing and the Latin grammatical tradition, but it is impossible to specify a place. The motivation for the invention may have been to give the Irish language a cultural status of equal prestige alongside Latin.

?

Stifter also makes a convincing argument that Ogham, as a phenomenon, is probably continuously associated with the south of Ireland. He points out that the written manuscript tradition of Old Irish sets towards the end of the classical Ogam period (roughly from the middle of the 7th Century onwards) are written in Latin script, and the first centres of manuscript writing in Old Irish were located in the north-east of Ireland (e.g., Bangor, Armagh). Whereas Ogam activities continued in the south and southwest of the island for some time afterwards, which he identifies as a curious dichotomy. Though of course some Ogham manuscripts do survive, and the intermingling of Ogham and Latin text is a feature of the Irish manuscription tradition.

?

I think the core of John’s argument is that the A151 subclade is most associated with the Uí Liatháin and Irish migration into Wales and the Ogham tradition followed with them. It might be no co-incidence that the O’Connells of Derrynane are an A151 cluster,? given the concentration of Ogham stones in territory of the Corca Dhuibhne. I may be misrepresenting his position, and if so apologies for that.

?

?

?

?

?

?

?