Ogham: The Mystery of Ireland’s Oldest Writing

Ogham is Ireland’s oldest known writing system, dating back more than 1,500 years. If you have ever seen strange lines carved along the edge of an old stone, you may have been looking at ogham.

But what did those marks mean? Who carved them? Were they gravestones, boundary markers, family claims to lands or something else entirely?

In this episode, I speak with ogham expert Dr Nora White about how this ancient writing system worked, where it came from and what it reveals about early Ireland. These short inscriptions preserve some of the earliest evidence of the Irish language, along with names, ancestors, territories and hints of a society changing through migration, Christianity and contact with Britain and the wider world.

Ogham may look simple, but it opens a window onto one of the most fascinating and mysterious periods in Irish history.

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Dr Nora White is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University. She

is currently leading a Research Ireland-funded project: Early Medieval Irish Scripts on Stone

(EMISoS). She previously worked on the Ogham in 3D project at the Dublin Institute for Advanced

Studies and subsequently (2021-2025) on the joint Maynooth University and University of Glasgow

OG(H)AM project (https://ogham.glasgow.ac.uk/).

Digital corpus (in progress) of ogham in Ireland and Britain: https://ogham.celt.dias.ie/list

Sound by Kate Dunlea

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