Ferguson — On Ogham Inscription at Breastagh. 203 



desired to express mm, there is no other way of doing it, so far as I 

 know, than by engraving the two constituent digits of g with a suffi- 

 cient distance between to show that they are to be separately regarded. 

 What will weigh, however, more than a possibly accidental disparity in 

 the spacing, is the fact that these digits are followed by others certainly 

 expressing xla or llo ; and that no Irish proper name is known to 

 commence with the letter-collocation agll. Were this an Anglo-Saxon 

 legend, one might accept agllo as a probable beginning of some such 

 name as Agllobert for Egilbert ; and indeed the name, whatever it be, 

 terminates with t. But the great unlikelihood of an Egilbert having 

 left a son Corbri throws us back on the duplicated m as the more 

 acceptable reading. 



What, then, shall we make of ammllo, followed by the imperfect 

 digits and erosions of the surface which occupy the next nine inches of 

 space leading up to the terminal t ? The name which will at once pre- 

 sent itself for identification, is Awley in its ancient form of Amalgaid. 

 But, to educe a corresponding sound from the text, we should have a 

 vowel before the duplicated m ; and in the text there is no trace of any 

 other letter, nor, indeed, room for a single notch between the duplicated 

 m's and l's which follow the initial a. And this difficulty holds equally 

 if we compare the Ogham with another form of the name of Awley 

 found in Tirechan's annotations, viz., Amolngid; and if the matter 

 rested here, one would be almost driven to recoil from the half-opened 

 doorway. But the forms of this singular name are not yet exhausted. 

 Duald Mac Firbis, in his "Genealogies of the Saints," in tracing the 

 pedigree of Cronan Mac Aengusa, derives him from Sedna, son of Am- 

 longda, being Amlongad in the genitive, and adds, " otherwise 'Amal- 

 gaid,' son of Fiachra, &c." Here, if we adopt the characteristic taste 

 of our Irish " Rune-smiths," of duplicating the consonants, we have 



ammllongad in comparison, with ammllo t of the Ogham, and 



it only remains to inquire whether the traces still existing in the hiatus 

 of the latter text be consistent with the presence there originally of the 

 digits and notches equivalent to ng, together with some vowel, probably 

 an i. In all the MS . keys to the Ogham, the sound of ng is represented 

 by a group of three oblique digits crossing the line ; and, in fact, one 

 such group exists in another part of the inscription before us ; so that, 

 most probably if ng were formerly here, we might reasonably look 

 for remains of such oblique digits in the interspace. I know how 

 deceitful is the vision of an investigator where the image already exists 

 on the retina of the mind's eye, and go no farther than to declare my 

 inability to discern any traces not reconcilable with the actual pre- 

 sence of such digits followed by the notches expressing the vowel i 

 before the t of the termination. And this t, it appears to me, is dupli- 

 cated, giving the resultant ammllojtcitt, as against the amlongad of 

 the author transcribed by Mac Firbis. 



But it may have occurred to my hearers to ask why I do not rather 

 turn to the opposite side of the pillar, where the name of the child or 

 descendant of this Corbri may be expected to be found ; for, if it be 



