Ancient Irish graffiti and a standing stone
As a fairly regular 'stone botherer' I'll always try to see some stone circles, burial mounds, landscape features etc when I'm out and about somewhere. This time my travels took me to the beautiful south west of Ireland and despite limited time, I was able to see something really special.
The 'Ballycrovane stone' is the tallest ogham stone in Ireland, stands 4.7m (or 5m something depending on what website you read) in height in an area with amazing views of the surrounding hills and water below.
As a standing stone alone, its impressive given its height and fairly spectactualr location but what makes it really interesting is the carving along one of its edges in the Ogham runic script.
Ogham is an ancient runic writing system from around the 5th century theoretically used to write ancient Irish (Proto-Goidelic) as apposed to the later 'Old Irish'. However its structure and vowel sounds, suggests it may also have been used to write Latin and other non Gaelic scripts including Norse (on Shetland).
Carved here into an a standing stone that long predates the script, the inscription reads upward from the lower left hand side edges towards the top of the stone and reads;
᚛ᚋᚐᚊᚔ MAQI
ᚇᚓᚉᚉᚓᚇᚇᚐᚄ DECCEDDAS
ᚐᚃᚔ AVI
ᚈᚒᚏᚐᚅᚔᚐᚄ᚜ TURANIAS
(lets see who has their Unicode support setup correctly. I had to make some changes to Firefox to get mine to display).
For the love of God, don't use this as a reference anywhere - my best effort to show letters based on information I can find and my own interpretation
This translates as 'belonging to Mac Deichet Uí Thorna' or of the son of Decched, from Torain. Was this carved as an ancient way marker, grave stone or simply as a sign that 'we was here!' its hard to say.
Here, above the waters of a small harbour and in the shadows of these misty hills, its not really a surprise that this stone was something really significant even before whoever came along and wrote on it. Certainly a very special place with an amazing energy. An almost as good site was soon to follow however.