Dál Riata · Pictland · Orkney · Shetland
Ogham crossed the North Channel with Irish settlers and took root in a land the Irish did not control. What the Picts then did with it — and what language they recorded — is one of the most contested open questions in Celtic studies.
The first thing to understand
Scotland presents not one Ogham story but two distinct and largely separate ones, and conflating them is the most common error made in popular treatments of the subject. The first is the story of Gaelic Ogham — brought to Scotland by Irish settlers, particularly in the west, closely related to the Irish tradition from which it sprang, and legible within the same scholarly framework as the Irish corpus. The second is the story of Pictish Ogham — inscriptions found predominantly in the east and north of Scotland, in areas historically associated with the Pictish kingdoms, which may or may not record the same kind of language as the Irish stones.
These two traditions use the same script. The physical system of lines and notches cut against a stemline is identical. But they may record fundamentally different things — different languages, different purposes, different peoples — and keeping them distinct is essential to understanding either.
Although Ogham probably originated in Ireland, it took root in northern Britain at a very early date and continued to flourish among both Gaels and Picts long after it had ceased to be used on memorial stones in Ireland.
Professor Katherine Forsyth, University of Glasgow, cited in White (2021)The western Scottish Ogham stones are the more straightforward of the two traditions. They are associated with Dál Riata — the Irish kingdom that straddled the North Channel, with territory in both County Antrim and Argyll, and whose settlers brought the Gaelic language, Irish Christianity, and Irish cultural practices to western Scotland from around the 5th century onwards (Forsyth, 1996).
These stones share the characteristic formulas of their Irish counterparts: the MAQI construction for "son of," the commemorative function, personal names in Primitive or Old Irish. They are broadly legible without specialist knowledge of Scotland. Their distribution is predominantly coastal, consistent with a tradition carried by seagoing communities along the Atlantic routes connecting Ireland and Scotland — the same routes along which Christianity, manuscripts, and metalworking techniques also travelled.
In Scotland and Man, monumental Ogham use continued considerably longer than in Ireland. Some stones from Gaelic Scotland and Pictland belong to the earlier orthodox phase, but in both areas monumental use extended to the 10th or even 11th century — two to three centuries after Irish stone inscription had largely ceased (Stifter, White and Forsyth, 2024; OG(H)AM Project, 2023).
The hard question
The eastern and northern Scottish inscriptions are a fundamentally different matter. Found in areas historically associated with the Pictish kingdoms — Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perthshire, Orkney, Shetland — these stones use the Ogham script but their inscriptions have resisted consistent interpretation using either Irish or any other known Celtic language (Forsyth, 1996; Rodway, 2020).
The Picts were the people living in what is now northern Scotland in the Late Roman and early medieval period. The Roman term Picti — "painted ones" — is what their neighbours called them; what they called themselves is unknown. They left behind an extraordinary visual tradition of incised symbol stones: geometric and animal symbols of great sophistication whose meaning is still not understood. But they left behind very little textual evidence. The Ogham inscriptions associated with Pictish areas are among the very few direct linguistic records of this people. That is what makes them invaluable — and fiercely debated.
The Picts adopted an Irish writing technology for their own purposes, probably through contact with Gaelic-speaking communities from Dál Riata and through the spread of Irish Christianity into Pictland in the 6th century. The script is the same. What was written with it may not be.
The question of what language the Pictish Ogham inscriptions record has been debated for over four hundred years and remains unresolved. Four scholarly positions have been advanced, each with serious advocates.
Four positions
The position most strongly associated with Professor Katherine Forsyth (Harvard PhD, 1996) is that Pictish was a form of Brythonic — the branch of Celtic that includes Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. On this view, the inscriptions record an early form of P-Celtic, related to but distinct from Irish Q-Celtic. Personal names and place names with clear Celtic etymologies support this reading.
Simon Rodway (2020) examined the five most promising Pictish inscriptions minutely and concluded they are not Celtic — that Celtic-looking sequences are due to coincidence. His conclusion: the language of the Pictish Ogham corpus remains unknown. This is a rigorous scholarly challenge that cannot be dismissed.
An older position held that Pictish was a non-Indo-European language, possibly related to Basque or some pre-Celtic substratum. John Koch has noted that no convincing non-Indo-European etymology can be offered for a single word or name in the corpus. This position is now largely discredited.
Richard Cox proposed in 1999 that the Scottish Ogham inscriptions record Old Norse. This hypothesis has been widely rejected by specialists. Even sources sympathetic to alternative readings of Pictish describe it as discredited (Cox, 1999; Rodway, 2020).
The honest position, in 2026, is that the Brythonic interpretation has the strongest scholarly support but has not achieved consensus. Rodway's challenge is serious. The corpus is too small and too fragmentary for certainty, and individual inscriptions continue to be contested between specialists of the highest calibre.
Two objects
Abstract scholarly positions are easier to understand through the specific inscriptions that drive them. Two objects crystallise the whole question.
A small object — a spindle-whorl, a weight used in spinning thread — found at Birsay on Mainland Orkney. Its Ogham inscription had long been considered a prime example of the Pictish mystery: a sequence of characters that could not be parsed in any known language. Earlier readings proposed something entirely opaque.
The carved sequence is not fully settled even at the letter level — the summary of the epigraphic literature gives it as E(s/n)DDACTA(n/lv)IM(v/lb), with individual strokes read differently by different scholars. What follows are the two full readings built from that base.
In 1995, Forsyth proposed a new reading: Benddact anim L. — "a blessing on the soul of L." On her reading, the spindle-whorl is not a Pictish inscription at all. It is evidence for the Irish language in pre-Viking Orkney — possibly a personal object belonging to an Irish-speaking individual living within a Pictish community. Forsyth also noted that the spindle-whorl's informal character suggests Ogham literacy was not restricted to elite commemorative contexts; it was accessible enough to be casually used on an everyday object.
Simon Rodway (2017) subsequently offered a different reading of the same inscription: T'ANIM VENDDAC — "from dear Venddac [Findach]" — interpreting it as the name of a man who gave the whorl to a woman as a gift. Both readings agree the inscription is comprehensible within a Celtic framework. They disagree about which Celtic language and what it says. The same small object, read by two of the field's leading scholars, produces two different but both plausible Celtic interpretations.
What the spindle-whorl demonstrates is both the progress and the limits of Pictish Ogham scholarship. Every reading is provisional.
See the full find record — findspot, museum, HES reference →
If the Buckquoy spindle-whorl represents a case where scholarship is moving towards legibility, the Lunnasting stone represents the opposite: an inscription that has defeated all attempts at consistent interpretation and remains, in the current state of knowledge, genuinely unread.
The Lunnasting stone is one of the longest Pictish Ogham inscriptions — which is precisely why it has attracted so much scholarly attention. Longer inscriptions offer more data; more data should allow more confident readings. But the Lunnasting inscription has not yielded. Forsyth has worked extensively on it. Within the inscription is a run of consonants — cited in the literature as CUHETTS — that has no satisfactory Celtic parallel, and Forsyth herself has acknowledged this. Different transliterations of the stone segment this section slightly differently, but the difficulty it poses is not in dispute. The leading advocate of the Brythonic Pictish position accepts that the corpus contains elements that cannot currently be explained (Rodway, 2020, citing Forsyth 1997).
The Lunnasting stone is the most honest emblem of where Pictish Ogham scholarship stands: further than it was, but not yet at a point where confident linguistic conclusions can be drawn across the whole corpus.
See the full find record — findspot, museum, HES reference →
The Pictish Ogham corpus is small, fragmentary, and resistant to the kind of systematic analysis that the larger Irish corpus allows. Every reading is provisional.
Part Seventeen, Ogham Research Document (2026)What the scholarship actually says
Despite the uncertainty, several things can be said with confidence about Scottish Ogham.
The physical script is the same as in Ireland. The Picts adopted an Irish writing technology — they did not develop an independent system. That adoption almost certainly came through contact with Dál Riata and through the spread of Irish Christianity into Pictland in the 6th century. The infrastructure of the script is Irish; what was written with it is the question.
Some Scottish inscriptions are straightforwardly in Gaelic Irish. The Buckquoy spindle-whorl, on the most widely accepted reading, is one of these — evidence for Irish-speaking individuals or communities present in Pictish territory. Others appear to record something different. That something is most probably a form of Brythonic Celtic, though the case is contested by serious scholars. None has been convincingly read as a non-Indo-European language. None has been convincingly read as Old Norse.
The Pictish Ogham inscriptions probably record a Celtic language, most likely Brythonic, but the corpus is too small and too fragmentary for certainty. Individual inscriptions continue to be contested between specialists of the highest calibre. The debate is not a failure of scholarship — it reflects the genuine difficulty of reading a small corpus of texts in a poorly attested language without a bilingual key.
The Pictish symbol stones — carved, incised, extraordinary — remain unread alongside the Ogham inscriptions. These were a people who left their mark extensively on the landscape of northern Scotland and almost nothing in the written record that survives. The Ogham stones are the closest thing to their voice that we have. That they remain, in part, illegible is not a reason to give up on them. It is a reason to keep working.
Why it matters
The Scottish Ogham story is, among other things, a story about the resilience of writing. Ogham was created in Ireland — probably in the 4th century, possibly earlier. It crossed the North Channel with people who used it for the same purposes as at home: commemorating the dead, marking territory, recording names. Then something unexpected happened. A people who did not speak Irish, who had their own language and their own visual tradition, adopted the Irish script and used it for their own ends.
Whether those ends were similar to the Irish ones — commemoration, identity, continuity — or different, we cannot say with certainty. The Pictish symbol stones that sometimes accompany the Ogham inscriptions suggest a rich visual culture whose conventions we have not cracked. The Ogham inscriptions sit alongside those symbols, using a borrowed script, in a language we cannot fully read, recording people whose names we cannot always parse.
And yet the stones are there. In Aberdeenshire and Angus and Orkney and Shetland. Cut with the same technique as the Kerry stones, using the same alphabet, by people who had learned to use it from people who had learned from people who first developed it, perhaps in a scriptorium or a law school or a royal court in early medieval Ireland.
The script survived the sea crossing. It survived contact with a people who spoke a different language. It survived several centuries in which Ireland had largely abandoned it for stone. Whatever the Lunnasting stone says, it says it in Ogham. That is not nothing.
The Pictish Ogham inscriptions probably record a Celtic language, most likely a form of Brythonic. The growing scholarly consensus, led by Professor Katherine Forsyth's doctoral work (Harvard, 1996) and subsequent publications, supports this view. Simon Rodway's 2020 challenge — that the inscriptions are not Celtic — is serious and cannot be dismissed. The older positions (non-Indo-European; Old Norse) have not been sustained. The honest position is that the debate is open, the corpus is small, and individual inscriptions remain contested.
Sources: Forsyth (1996, 1997); Rodway (2020); Stifter, White and Forsyth (2024); OG(H)AM Project (2023); White (2021).
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