Look closely at photos of ogham stones and the carving rarely looks fine or careful. The strokes wander, the spacing drifts, and some letters are barely legible even under good light. That’s not decay. Ogham was mostly cut by hand with a hammer and chisel straight onto whatever stone was standing nearby, and the people doing the cutting weren’t stonemasons working to a template. A 2013-2014 survey by the University of Glasgow’s OG(H)AM project, carried out with professional letter-carver Séighean Ó Draoi under researcher Dr. Nora White, examined ogham stones in the National Museum of Ireland up close and worked out roughly how it was done.
Two tools, two results
The survey found two main tools behind almost every inscription. A point chisel, a metal hand tool with a pyramidal tip, was struck with a hammer or mallet to rough out the strokes. Used this way it left a technique called pocking: rows of small overlapping dents that were sometimes smoothed afterward and sometimes left rough. A flat chisel, held at an angle and struck more precisely, produced cleaner work instead, cutting a distinct V-shaped groove with straight, almost parallel sides. A few carvers also used a sharp point or a chisel corner to score thin lines by friction rather than percussion, without any hammer blow at all.
None of these are specialist tools. They’re the same basic kit a stone carver would reach for today. What varies is skill and patience, and ogham inscriptions show plenty of both extremes.
No surface prep, no fixed plan
One of the more surprising findings is what didn’t happen before carving started. There’s no evidence of any systematic smoothing or marking-out of the stone surface beforehand. A handful of inscriptions show faint guide-lines, but most carvers just picked a natural edge, or arris, of the stone and started cutting straight into it. That’s part of why quality varies so much from stone to stone: some carvers clearly measured their spacing as they went, others didn’t, and a few seem to have run out of room and crammed the final letters together to fit.
A stone that shows its own working
The clearest single example of this unevenness is Monataggart 1 in Co. Cork (CIIC 118), a sandstone pillar reading VEQREQ MOQOI GLUNLEGGET, roughly “of Fíachrai from the kin-group Glúnleced.” The inscription mixes both techniques in a single carving: the opening letters are tight, fine V-cuts, the middle stretch turns broader and pocked, and the final word reverts to fine cutting before finishing with three more pocked strokes. The carver also confused two of the letter groups partway through, cutting T for V and N for Q. It’s a rare, almost visible record of someone’s hand changing pace, or changing tools, partway through the job.
Monataggart 1 was found doing an entirely different job in 1872, pulled from a field and reused as a gatepost, its ogham only spotted afterward. Two more inscribed stones from the same site turned up built into a souterrain nearby, a common fate for ogham stones once the script had fallen out of use.
Reading the tool marks today
Modern recording has made these details far easier to see than they ever were to the naked eye. Monataggart 1 itself was scanned in 3D with a structured-light scanner in 2022 as part of the same OG(H)AM project, letting researchers examine stroke depth and tool marks on screen rather than by squinting at weathered stone in the field. It’s the same approach behind Mayo’s ogham stones going digital, and it’s slowly changing how much can be said about individual carvers rather than just individual inscriptions.
None of this makes ogham a crude script. It makes it a practical one: memorial text cut quickly into standing stone with ordinary tools, by people who cared more about marking a name than producing fine lettering. If you want to work through what those strokes actually spell out once they’re cut, our guide to reading ogham walks through the letters stroke by stroke, and the full ogham stone map has hundreds of inscriptions like Monataggart’s to compare against.
Further Reading
- Nora White, “Ogham Carving Techniques,” OG(H)AM project blog, University of Glasgow, 2024
- Damian McManus, A Guide to Ogam (Maynooth Monographs, 1991)
- Ogham in 3D, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies