Provenance
Discovery: The rock carvings at the fortress of Dunadd (Dún Ad ‘fort of the river Add’) were known since 1929, however the ogham inscription went unnoticed until the 1950s. The nucleated fort is situated on an isolated hillock, 6km NNW of Lochgilphead. The ogham inscription was officially published and recognized by the scholarly community in 1953 through Stewart Cruden of the Ancient Monuments Inspectorate. Kenneth Jackson examined the inscription on behalf of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and published his account in 1965. The entire carved surface was covered with a fibreglass facsimile in 1978 to protect the carvings from the elements and vandalism.
Findspot: Kilmichael Glassary, Argyll, Scotland (National Grid Reference: NR 83650 93560)
Last recorded location(s): Forsyth (1996, 232) visited Dunadd in August 1995 in situ, by which time the facsimile had been in place for 18 years and ‘there is no reason to believe that the carved surface, which is still completely intact, is significantly less clear than when it was first cast in 1978’.
Support
Trove 212008
Object type: Rock face
Material: Slate
Dimensions: H 0.5 × diam. 4 cm
Decoration: As described by Forsyth (1996, 230), the carvings consist of ‘a rock basin, below the entrance through the NE wall of the summit fort, and 2m to the north-east spread over a distance of about 3m,’ is a foot-print, an incised boar, another foot-print and the ogham inscription.
Condition: The upper arris is more weathered and indistinct while the lower line is more defined and legible. This is most likely because the upper strokes of both lines are carved on the horizontal surface of the stone and thus more exposed to weathering. In comparison, the lower strokes are better preserved because they reach down into the fissures and have been shielded to some extent (Forsyth 1996, 230). Though the carving is badly weathered, the component strokes are generally even and consistent (Forsyth 1996, 236).
Inscription
Text field: The Dunadd ogham inscription is found alongside a number of other carvings on a ‘flattish terrace of bare rock riven with fissures’. The ogham inscription is comprised of ‘two lines of text arranged horizontally across the rock-face, one above the other, and roughly parallel with two natural horizontal fissures in the rock. The inscription is largely contained in an area bound by two oblique fissures, though the upper line continues for a few strokes beyond the right-hand fissure’ (Forsyth 1996, 230). The inscription reads from left-to-right, as is confirmed by the direction of the slope of individual letters.
Letters: ‘The strokes are too weathered to determine whether they were cut or pocked’ (Forsyth 1996, 230-231). There is no drawn stem-line, instead the curved edges of the horizontal fissures act as the arrises for the ogham inscription. Written in simple and unremarkable form of the script with the b- and h-aicme consonants slightly sloped in the expected direction while the m-aicme is steeply sloped. The vowels are formed of short lines that extend no more than the middle quarter of the ogham band. The letters are clearly spaced, and as Forsyth (1996, 236) comments ‘with extra distance placed between successive letters of the same aicme’.
Date: Late-eighth to early-ninth century (form_of_script)
Edition
Ogham text: ᚐᚓᚄᚇ[---
Transcription: AESD[---]T[---]VNA[---]T VIRRMONAI
Critical apparatus:
- Forsyth (1996, 230) notes that the ‘horizontal arrangement of ogham text is unusual but not without precedent’. Furthermore, ‘there is no indication whether the two lines are to be read together as one continuous text, and if so, in which order. Each line could be an independent sense unit’. 2. Jackson (1965) read: Upper: HCSD[.]t[..]v.H[.]T Lower: L[…]VQR(R/I)HMDNHQ 3. Padel (1972) read: Upper: AESD[-]T[-]V-A [-]T[V Lower: L […]VIRR(H/A)MDNA
Translation
Finn the monk/monastic tenant
Commentary
With the snatches of text available it is difficult to comment on what kind of text this inscription is meant to detail. However, despite the carving being on a fairly small scale, it is too grand to be a graffiti but it is still not evident enough that it is official, especially when factoring its potential dating after the site’s greatness.
Bearing in mind the snatches of text we are able to grasp, the upper portion of the inscription AES could be the OIr noun áes meaning ‘folk, people, those who’. Forsyth (1996, 237) argues that this is most commonly followed by a qualifying clause, adjective or noun in the genitive, in this case there is insufficient evidence to make sense of what follows.
The lower part, or the second arris, as argued by Forsyth (1996, 237), contains two words, Finn Manach. Potentially Old Irish Finn is the personal name and Monach an adjectival epithet connoting status or ethnic origin. The first word Finn or Fionn means ‘fair, bright, white, light-hued’. The second word Manach appears to be a sobriquet. There are two possible interpretations, as Forsyth (!996, 237-238) explains, the first is manach which means ‘monk’ but is also a legal term for a tenant of church-lands not necessarily living under religious rule, and the second is frequently spelled manach but is actually the word monach and refers to those who are ‘able to perform feats or tricks, dextrous, skilled’. The orthography of the name is not without dating significance, Dunadd’s FINN cannot be earlier than the eighth century, and is probably no older than the end of that century or even the beginning of the next (Forsyth 1996, 237-238).
Forsyth (1996, 241) argues against previous arguments of Pictish origins from Curle (1940), Thomas (1964), Radford (1953) and Jackson (1965), maintaining that such notions reduce the ogham to provocative graffiti, on the unstable basis that there have been no subsequent raids on Dunadd which escaped the record. Contrastingly, Forsyth (1996, 241) contends that ‘there can be absolutely no grounds for describing the Dunadd ogham ‘Pictish” but rather its physical location and ogham script is more common throughout all the areas in which this alphabet was used. Its unusual location is paralleled in Ireland enforcing, under Forsyth’s interpertation, its Gaelic origins.
According to Forsyth (1996, 236), the ogham inscription is comparable to the Bac Mhic Connain, and even more closely to that of Gurness which suggest that ‘If the proposed reading is accepted then it precludes a date earlier than the eighth century’. More notably the Dunadd ogham is an indication of how the simple forms of the script were in use beyond the seventh century abandonment, as Forsyth (1996, 236) comments ‘of the individual inscribed memorial monument-type’.
References
- Curle 1940, 60-116
- Forsyth 1996, 227-242
- Jackson 1965, 300-302
- Padel 1972, 89-92
- Radford 1953, 237-239
- Thomas 1964, 31-97