If you had been standing on the edge of a particular trench in Silchester on one day in 1893 and gazing down into the partially excavated shallow well associated with Insula IX (a house oddly angled at 45o to the Roman city road grid), you would have been lucky enough to see a very odd stone emerging some five or six feet down.
Further excavations would eventually reveal the stone, which was thrown in, upside down, possibly to “kill” or ritually close the well. The stone has two strange sets of markings running vertically up one side, both with a line through the middle. Secondly, under the stone and crushed by it, was a pewter flagon. No other objects of interest were brought up at the time.
And here begins the enigma. The stone’s inscription was in Ogham, an Irish script that spread to Wales, Cornwall and west coast Scotland. Silchester’s Ogham stone was then, and remains today, not only the most easterly Ogham inscription ever found in Britain – but the only one found in England at all! More surprisingly it is one of the very earliest of all Ogham inscriptions, probably dating from the early 400s AD.
More, with a photo of the stone at
http://www.archaeologyinmarlow.org.uk/2011/02/the-enigma-of-silchester%E2%80%99s-ogham-stone/
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