182 The Bishop of Bristol [May 19, 



it used as his own grave-stone. It was not used for that purpose, 

 and it is now in the cloister at Queen's College, Cork. It is remark- 

 able for a large Maltese cross cut on its face, all but interfering with 

 the ogam scores. Either the cross was cut first, and the ogam- 

 cutter turned the stone upside down and cut his ogam upwards ; or 

 the cross-cutter found an ogam stone and turned it upside down to 

 cut his cross at the top. In the case of the Lly well stone, as we shall 

 see, it is certain that either the cutter of the ogams or the cutter of 

 the human figures, whichever came last, turned his predecessor's 

 work upside down. I do not hesitate to make the ogam-cutter the 

 predecessor of the other. The cutters of the Knockourane cross and 

 the Llywell human figures probably had not the faintest idea of the 

 meaning of the ogams or of the direction in which they must be read. 



The reading as given by my rubbing is annaccanni maqi aill- 

 uatt(a)n. I am inclined to think that there are signs of an Ogam 

 score below the first a. The second nn is rather doubtful, and may 

 be ss. The q is unusual, running past the arris and appearing on the 

 face of the stone ; but the scores do not slant, and I do not see how 

 we can read it as r, still less how Sir S. Ferguson can make it stand 

 for both q and r, I have omitted the a in the last syllable of the 

 third word, and Sir S. Ferguson omitted it ; there is, however, cer- 

 tainly a notch in the stone where the a ought to be if it ever was 

 there. Finally, the concluding scores slant decidedly, and the arris 

 is not well-defined. I should not resist the reading r, though linguistic 

 probabilities point to n. Sir S. Ferguson would seem not to have 

 seen the stone itself ; but the rubbing supplied to him was clear 

 enough to warn him of difficulties not present to the eye of Mr. 

 Brash. Both names are well known. Hannagan is an Irish name 

 still, and the form Aenagan appears in the Four Masters as late as 

 the years 878, 893, 898. The other goes very far back ; the name of 

 no less a person than the father of Ogma the sun-worshipper was 

 Ealladan. Sir S. Ferguson read Aillittr, by adding a notch between 

 the u and a ; but there is certainly no notch there now. He made 

 Aillittr mean " the pilgrim." It should be noted that a rubbing of 

 this stone seems to show ogam scores where in fact no scores exist. 



The stone at St. Dogmael's Abbey (Fig. 16) near Cardigan, is of 

 great interest. It was the first ogam stone found with an inscription in 

 Latin letters : it is also bilingual. Before the discovery of this stone, 

 it had been a matter of dispute whether the Book of Ballymote gave 

 the correct key to the Ogam script, the letters of the Irish inscrip- 

 tions giving such curious words according to that key. It had, how- 

 ever, been acutely argued, that inasmuch as a certain group of four 

 ogam scores occurred in so large a number of the inscriptions as to 

 be almost universal, this group of four probably represented the word 

 " son," coming between the name of the dead man and the name of 

 his father ; further, that as the name was probably in the genitive, 

 the words " the monument," or " the memorial stone," or " the body," 

 or " grave," being understood, the word " son " would also be in the 

 genitive, and in the early times the genitive would be inflexioned 



