Ogham is usually treated as a Gaelic story: Irish scribes, Irish stones, an Irish alphabet that occasionally wandered into Wales or Cornwall. But some of the most striking Norse ogham inscriptions come from much further north, carved on Orkney and Shetland by people living through the Viking Age, mixing Gaelic formulas, Pictish names, and Old Norse words on the same stone.
These aren’t obscure footnotes. They’re two of the more closely studied stones in the whole ogham corpus, and they show a script that outlasted the culture that supposedly invented it.
An Irish Script at the Edge of the Viking World
Ogham reached Pictish Scotland well before the Vikings did, carried north through contact with Gaelic-speaking Ireland sometime around the fifth or sixth century. By the time Norse raiders and settlers arrived in Orkney and Shetland in the eighth and ninth centuries, ogham was already an established, if unevenly used, part of local commemorative practice, alongside Pictish symbol stones and Christian crosses.
Norway’s king Harald Fairhair is traditionally credited with formally absorbing Orkney and Shetland into his kingdom around 875, but Norse settlement had been building for decades before that. What’s notable is what didn’t happen next. The Norse settlers who took over the islands didn’t simply replace the local script with runes. For at least a couple of generations, ogham kept being carved, sometimes by people clearly writing in a language that wasn’t Gaelic or Pictish at all.
The Pool Stone: An Inheritance in Ogham
In 1985, excavations at Pool, on the island of Sanday in Orkney, uncovered a slab bearing a weathered ogham inscription, set upright inside a Pictish settlement structure. It’s one of the only ogham inscriptions from Britain or Ireland found in a scientifically datable archaeological context rather than reused as building rubble or turned up by chance.
The slab is a palimpsest. Two human figures, carved in different styles, sit underneath the ogham text, suggesting the stone had already been decorated once before anyone cut letters into it. The ogham itself reads upwards along an artificial stemline, and the surviving text runs ARV AV ORC[---], badly damaged at the end.
Katherine Forsyth, examining the stone for her 1996 Harvard doctoral thesis, connected ORC to the tribal and geographic name for Orkney, the same root behind Orcadian place names recorded in the Annals of Ulster. A 2024 photogrammetry survey by Dr Megan Kasten, part of the University of Glasgow’s OG(H)AM project, produced a sharper 3D model of the surface, which led David Stifter to propose reading the text as Old Norse: arf af Orc, “inheritance of Orkney.” Radiocarbon dates from the surrounding structure point to the early ninth century, meaning that if the Old Norse reading holds, someone was carving Old Norse in the Irish alphabet in Orkney within a few generations of Viking settlement beginning. The stone is now on display at the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall, and you can see its full inscription record and photographs on Ogham Lore’s stone database.
The Bressay Stone: A Family of Two Peoples
The clearer case sits in Shetland. The Bressay stone, an elaborately decorated cross-slab found near St Mary’s Church in the first half of the nineteenth century, carries two separate ogham inscriptions running up its narrow edges, twenty-nine letters on one side and nineteen on the other, framing a carved cross, a lion, and a horseman.
The longer inscription reads CRROSCC NAHHTVVDDADDS DATTRR ANN, and the shorter reads BENNISES MEQQ DDROANN. Philologists have picked the words apart layer by layer. CRROSCC is a Gaelic-derived word for “cross.” NAHHTVVDDADDS looks like a Pictish personal name, related to the well-attested Nechtan. DATTRR has long been read as a rendering of Old Norse dóttir, “daughter.” ANN may be a Gaelic name or, just as plausibly, the Norse male name Án, recorded in the Icelandic Landnámabók. On the shorter side, MEQQ is the same “son of” formula found across the ogham world as MAQI, and DDROANN is a well-attested Irish personal name. Even the double dots used to separate words on the stone are borrowed directly from the punctuation used in contemporary runic inscriptions.
Katherine Forsyth’s 1996 study of the stone concluded that Bressay commemorates a family formed by intermarriage between Norse and Gaelic or Pictish speakers, dated to the ninth or early tenth century. It’s now held at the National Museums of Scotland. The full transcription, translation debate, and photographs are on Ogham Lore’s record for the Bressay stone.
Why Ogham Survived the Vikings At All
Runes were the Norse settlers’ own script, and they used them plenty, most famously in the dozens of runic inscriptions scratched into the walls of the Neolithic tomb at Maeshowe. But ogham didn’t disappear from Orkney and Shetland once Norse political control took hold. Stones like Pool and Bressay suggest a period where two carving traditions, and the languages behind them, sat side by side, sometimes on the same slab.
That’s a more complicated picture than “the Vikings arrived and everything changed.” Intermarriage, religious continuity through the church, and the simple fact that ogham was already the local monumental script all point to a slower, messier blending of cultures than a straightforward conquest narrative allows. For a script often flattened into a purely Irish or purely Celtic symbol, that messiness is worth sitting with. You can trace its wider journey from early Irish pillar stones to these Norse-influenced monuments in Scotland on our history and origins of ogham page, or browse the full interactive map of surviving ogham stones, including every stone in Orkney and Shetland mentioned here.
Further Reading
- Forsyth, Katherine. The Ogham Inscriptions of Scotland: An Edited Corpus. PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1996.
- Kasten, Megan. “Digging into the Archaeological Context of the Pool Ogham Stone (S-ORK-008).” OG(H)AM project blog, University of Glasgow, 7 February 2025.
- Forsyth, Katherine. “Ogham in the British Museum.” OG(H)AM project blog, University of Glasgow, 24 January 2024.
- Allen, J. Romilly, and Joseph Anderson. The Early Christian Monuments of Scotland. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1903.