Qualla: Emlagh East Ogham Stone

Emlagh East Ogham Stone: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. Run your fingers up the edge of the stone and you can still feel them - the small notches and short straight lines of an alphabet that died before English was born. Someone carved this monument sometime between AD 400 and 470, while Saint Patrick was alive and walking the same island. The inscription names a man called Bruscus, son of Cailech. We do not know what he looked like, what trade he kept, or how he died. We know only that his family wanted his name to outlast everything else around them. They were right. The stone is still here. Bruscus is, in his own strange way, still here.

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Emlagh East Ogham Stone: An Alphabet Made of Lines

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. Ogham is one of the strangest writing systems Europe has produced. Instead of letters with bowls and stems, it uses groups of straight lines cut along the edge of a stone - one line for B, two lines for L, three for V, and so on through twenty letters of the Primitive Irish alpha...

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Emlagh East Ogham Stone: First to Be Recorded

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. The Welsh naturalist Edward Lluyd noticed the stone in 1702 and wrote it down. That seemingly small act made the Emlagh East monument the first ogham stone ever formally recorded in Ireland. Lluyd was a polymath of his age - keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, friend to Isaac Newton,...

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Emlagh East Ogham Stone: A Stone with Two Faiths

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. A cross is carved into the stone, but no one is sure who put it there. It might be contemporary with the ogham, marking a Christian grave at the very moment Christianity was arriving on the Dingle Peninsula. It might be a later addition, carved by a passing monk centuries afterwa...

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Emlagh East Ogham Stone: Stories the Locals Kept

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. Near the ogham stone lies a flat slab called Lackshivaunnageelagh in English, or in Irish Leac Shiobhán na nGeimhleach - 'the flagstone of Siobhán of the captives.' Who Siobhán was, and what captives she kept or freed, has been lost to legend. But the surrounding landscape preser...

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Emlagh East Ogham Stone: Hidden in Plain Sight

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. The stone is unprepossessing in person. It is 239 centimetres tall, 61 centimetres wide, made of coarse grit, and it now rests on a low concrete base near where it originally stood. There is no visitor centre. No fence. No queue. Pilgrims of a different kind arrive - linguists, e...

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