Ogham: The Tree Alphabet, Meanings and Divination Use
By DailyDestiny Editorial Team
You saw notched strokes along a line on a stone, a pendant or a deck, and felt drawn to know what they say. Learn the twenty ogham letters of the celtic tree alphabet, the ancient stones, the medieval kennings behind ogham meanings, and where history stops and modern divination begins.
On this page
What is ogham and who used the ogham alphabet?
Imagine you are on holiday in the west of Ireland, standing next to a tall grey stone in a wet field. Along its edge you see rows of short notches, worn soft by centuries of rain. Or maybe you spotted the same marks on a friend's pendant or a deck of cards, and you cannot stop wondering what they say.
The short answer: Ogham is a real early medieval alphabet of twenty letters, made from groups of one to five straight strokes cut across or beside a central line. It was made to write Primitive Irish, mostly as short inscriptions on standing stones. Those stones record names, not spells, and the divination use came much later.
The people who used it were the Irish of the fourth to sixth centuries, along with Irish settlers in Wales, the Isle of Man, Scotland, and Devon and Cornwall. Almost every inscription is a personal name in the genitive, usually with a father's name attached. That suggests the stones worked as territorial and memorial markers, more like a family name on a gatepost than a book.
The medieval Irish credited the invention to Ogma mac Elathan, a figure of the Tuatha De Danann linked with eloquence and strength, and the script's name is generally connected to him. A related Gaulish god, Ogmios, is described by the second-century Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata as a Celtic Herakles who leads willing men by fine chains running from his tongue to their ears. It is an image of persuasive speech that suits a script named for a god of words.
Learning the technical words pays off, because modern practice uses them constantly.
A single letter is a fid, plural feda, literally a wood or tree. Each stroke is a flesc, a twig or rod. The central line the strokes hang from is the druim, the ridge or spine. The twenty letters sit in four aicmi, families, each named for its first letter: aicme Beithe, aicme hUatha, aicme Muine and aicme Ailme.
That four-by-five structure is the best clue to how ogham was designed. It is not the Latin alphabet shuffled at random. The sounds are grouped in a way that suggests someone with grammatical training sat down and built a system. The standard scholarly treatment, Damian McManus's A Guide to Ogam, published in 1991, argues exactly that: a literate designer who knew the Latin grammarians, producing a script deliberately unlike Latin letters.
Ogham also has no letter for P in its original twenty, because Primitive Irish had lost that sound. It keeps a Q for a labiovelar sound that later merged into C.
What language does the ogham alphabet write?
On the stones it writes Primitive Irish, an archaic form of Irish that still kept final syllables later lost in Old Irish. A name that appears on a stone as MAQI DECCEDDAS becomes something far shorter in Old Irish. Later manuscript ogham writes Old Irish, and the forfeda were added to cope with sounds and diphthongs the original twenty letters handled poorly.
Does ogham have a Unicode block?
Yes. Ogham has its own Unicode block running from U+1680 to U+169F, covering the twenty original letters, the forfeda, and the marks that open and close an inscription. U+1680 is the OGHAM SPACE MARK, and U+169B and U+169C are the feather mark and reversed feather mark that show where a text begins and ends. So ogham displays on ordinary devices, as long as you have a font that supports the block.
Who invented ogham according to Irish tradition?
Irish tradition credits Ogma mac Elathan. The Ogam Tract preserved in the Book of Ballymote says the first ogham ever written was seven strokes of beith, birch, cut on a birch rod and sent to Lug. It warned that his wife would be carried off seven times to the otherworld unless birch protected her. From its very first story, ogham is framed as a script of warning and protection.
What are the twenty letters of the celtic tree alphabet?
Once you see the four families laid out, the whole alphabet clicks into place.
The order starts Beith Luis Fern Sail Nin rather than A B C, which is why the script is sometimes called Beth-Luis-Nion.
Aicme Beithe: Beith (B, birch), Luis (L, rowan), Fern (F, alder), Sail (S, willow) and Nin (N, ash).
Aicme hUatha: Uath (H, hawthorn), Dair (D, oak), Tinne (T, holly), Coll (C, hazel) and Cert (Q, apple).
Aicme Muine: Muin (M, vine), Gort (G, ivy), nGetal (NG, broom or reed), Straif (Z or St, blackthorn) and Ruis (R, elder).
Aicme Ailme, the vowels: Ailm (A, silver fir or pine), Onn (O, gorse), Ur (U, heather), Edad (E, aspen) and Idad (I, yew).
Position inside the family is what tells each letter apart. Beith is one stroke and Nin is five strokes on the same side, while Uath is one stroke on the opposite side of the druim.
The tree names are not equally reliable, and knowing which are solid changes how you read ogham meanings.
Solid trees. Beith, Fern, Sail, Dair, Coll, Straif and Idad are trees by the plain sense of their names: birch, alder, willow, oak, hazel, blackthorn and yew.
Trees by later assignment. Uath means horror or fear before it means hawthorn. Gort means a field or a crop of standing corn, not ivy. Muin is unclear even in Irish, glossed as neck, trick and love, with vine attached afterward. Tinne looks like a word for a bar or ingot of metal. Onn is glossed as gorse, but its old kenning describes something that wounds horses, which fits furze underfoot.
The clearest made-up pair. Edad and Idad are two names built to rhyme and fill out the vowel family, with Idad linked to ibar, yew, only by association.
So if you treat all twenty as botanical portraits, you are working with a medieval scholarly layer, not the original naming. That is fine, as long as you know which layer you are standing on.
What are the forfeda in the ogham alphabet?
The forfeda are five extra ogham letters added after the original twenty, found mainly in manuscripts. They are Ebad, Or, Uilleann, Pin or Ifin, and Emancholl, covering diphthongs and sounds such as EA, OI, UI, IO and AE, with P eventually handled here. Their tree glosses are late and shaky: elecampane, spindle, honeysuckle, gooseberry and witch hazel, whose name Emancholl means twin of hazel.
Why does ogham have a letter Q but no letter P?
Ogham has Cert for Q because Primitive Irish still used a labiovelar sound written QU or KW in names such as MAQI, meaning son, which later became mac. It has no original P because that sound had dropped out of the language entirely. When Latin loanwords brought P back, scribes handled it with a forfid, Pin, or by doubling other letters. That shows the alphabet was designed for Irish first and adapted later.
What does the name Beth-Luis-Nion mean?
It is a traditional name for the ogham alphabet taken from its opening letters, the same way alphabet comes from alpha and beta. The actual sequence is Beith, Luis, Fern, Sail, Nin, so the third part skips ahead to the fifth letter. Some medieval sources give Beithe-Luis-Fearn instead. It is handy shorthand for the ogham letter order and appears all through modern ogham divination writing.
How is ogham written and read on stone and in manuscripts?
If you ever stand in front of an ogham stone, knowing which way to read it turns a row of scratches into a name.
On stone, the writing runs along the natural vertical edge, called the arris, which serves as the druim. You read from the bottom of the left-hand edge upward, across the top, and down the right-hand edge if the text is long. There is no drawn line on stone. The corner of the rock is the line.
The four families are told apart by where their strokes sit against that edge:
Aicme Beithe cuts one to five strokes on one face.
Aicme hUatha cuts one to five on the opposite face.
Aicme Muine cuts strokes that cross the edge at a slant.
Aicme Ailme cuts short notches straight across it.
In manuscripts the layout turns sideways. The druim is drawn as a horizontal line read left to right, with the first family below the line, the second above, the third crossing diagonally, and the vowels crossing straight through. Manuscript ogham also uses an arrow-like feather mark to show where the text starts and a tail mark to close it.
This design matters when you carve your own ogham staves. Because a letter is defined by how many strokes it has and where they sit, a turned or flipped stave can be misread. Five strokes on one side of the line is Nin. Five on the other side is Quert.
On a stone that confusion never comes up, because you know which way is up and which face is which. On a loose wooden stave tossed onto a cloth, it comes up all the time. That is why most modern sets carve or burn a clear stemline down the stave and often mark the base.
The stroke system also makes ogham quick to cut with a chisel or knife and easy to read from a distance in low, slanting light. It is the reason so many worn stones can still be transcribed: the count survives even when the surface does not. The same logic underlies the cipher oghams of the Ogam Tract, where count and position move from a stone edge to the shin, the nose or the fingers.
Which direction do you read ogham on a standing stone?
Upward. Start at the bottom left corner and read to the top. If the inscription continues, it turns across the head of the stone and comes down the far edge. This bottom-to-top order is a reliable rule for the Irish stones, and it separates authentic inscriptions from modern decorative ogham, which is often laid out left to right in manuscript style.
What are the cipher oghams in the Ogam Tract?
They are variant systems listed in In Lebor Ogaim, the Ogam Tract in the Book of Ballymote, which records well over ninety scales built on the same counting logic. Cossogam, foot ogham, signals letters by placing fingers against the shin. Sronogam uses the nose as the stemline, and basogam the palm. These are scribal games and signalling codes, not divination systems, but they show how flexible the ogham framework was.
How is ogham carved on a wooden stave?
First mark a stemline down the flat face, then cut the letter's strokes across or beside it exactly as they would sit on a stone edge. Readers often burn the stemline in with a pyrography tip so it stays visible after handling. Mark the base end too, because an upside-down stave can turn a five-stroke Nin into a five-stroke Quert.
Where are the ogham stones and what do the inscriptions say?
You might hope the old stones hold secret messages, and what they really hold is quieter and, in its way, more moving: people's names.
Where they are. Roughly four hundred inscribed ogham stones survive, most in Ireland, with the densest clusters in counties Kerry, Cork and Waterford. Smaller groups stand in southwest Wales, the Isle of Man, Scotland, Devon and Cornwall, plus a stray example from the Roman town at Silchester in Hampshire.
What they say. A name and a relationship, again and again. The commonest formula is X MAQI Y, meaning X son of Y. AVI or AVVI marks a grandson or descendant. MUCOI names the kin-group a man belonged to. ANM introduces a name. KOI works roughly as here, like the Latin hic iacit on memorial stones of the same period.
The Ballycrovane stone in west Cork, standing over five meters, carries MAQI DECCEDDAS AVI TURANIAS. Nothing in the corpus is a prayer, a charm, a spell or an oracle.
R. A. S. Macalister cataloged the inscriptions in his Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum, published in 1945, and scholars still cite its numbering.
The Welsh stones did the decoding. Several are bilingual, with the same name in ogham along one edge and in Roman capitals in Latin on the face. That handed scholars a direct key to the sound of each fid, and confirmed that the medieval letter lists had kept the system accurately.
The Scottish material is harder. Ogham inscriptions from Pictish areas, including the Lunnasting stone in Shetland and the Brandsbutt stone in Aberdeenshire, use recognizable ogham letters to spell sequences that resist translation into any known language. They remain among the most argued-over inscriptions in northern Britain.
Many Irish stones were also moved, reused as lintels and building stone, or set into souterrains and early church sites, so where a stone was found and where it first stood often differ. A lintel at Oweynagat, the cave at Rathcroghan in County Roscommon, carries an ogham inscription in a place already thick with legend. The Discovery Programme's Ogham in 3D project has laser-scanned a large part of the corpus and published the models publicly.
How old are the ogham stones?
They are generally dated to between the fourth and sixth centuries. Some scholars argue for a start in the fourth century or a little earlier, and most agree the custom of carving stones faded by the seventh. The dating rests on the language rather than on excavation: the Primitive Irish forms on the stones have grammatical endings that had vanished by the time Old Irish was written in manuscripts.
Are ogham stones grave markers?
They are usually described as memorial and boundary markers rather than confirmed grave markers, because very few have been excavated in direct association with a burial. A name plus ancestry suits a claim to land and lineage as much as a memorial to the dead. Some later stones were brought into Christian sites and carry crosses cut beside the ogham, showing continued use across the conversion period.
What does MAQI mean on an ogham stone?
MAQI is the Primitive Irish word for son in the genitive, and it is the single most common word in the ogham corpus. It later becomes mac in Irish. An inscription reading X MAQI Y names X, son of Y. Related formula words include AVI for descendant or grandson, which gives the later ui in surnames, and MUCOI, which introduces the kin-group or ancestral figure the man was counted under.
What are the ogham meanings for each letter?
If you want the oldest voice of each letter, you will find it in riddles, not in gentle tree descriptions.
The oldest recorded ogham meanings are kennings: short, riddling phrases kept in three medieval lists called the briatharogaim, or word-oghams. They are attributed to Morann mac Moin, to Mac ind Oc, and to Cu Chulainn. Each list gives a two- or three-word gloss for every fid:
Luis: li sula, delight of the eye.
Fern: airenach fian, vanguard of warrior bands.
Sail: li ambi, the hue of the lifeless.
Dair: ardam dossaib, highest of bushes.
Coll: cainem fedaib, fairest of trees.
Muin: tressam fedmae, strongest in exertion.
Gort: milsiu feraib, sweeter than grasses.
Ruis: ruamna drech, reddening of faces.
Ailm: ardam iachta, loudest of groanings.
Onn: congnaid echraide, wounder of horses.
Ur: uaraib adbaib, in cold dwellings.
Idad: sinem fedo, oldest of woods.
These have the best claim to antiquity, and they are short, physical and often uncomfortable rather than soft.
Readers who work from the briatharogaim read very differently from those who use tree lore alone.
Take Sail, willow. The tree gloss gives water, flexibility and the moon. The kenning gives the pallor of a corpse, and willow's grey-green leaf becomes the color of a body without blood in it.
Ruis under tree lore is elder, a hedgerow shrub of berries and elder-mother stories. Under the kenning it is the flush of shame or rage rising in a face. You will feel it in a reading about something you cannot hide.
Onn as gorse is a cheerful yellow-flowered plant. As the wounder of horses, it is a spiky obstacle on the track.
Ailm read as silver fir suggests height and clear air, while ardam iachta, the loudest of cries, points to the sound a person makes at birth or in grief.
Erynn Rowan Laurie's Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom, published in 2007, is the best-known modern treatment built mainly on the kennings rather than the tree calendar, and it produces a noticeably harder-edged reading style.
What is a briatharogam?
A briatharogam is a word-ogham: a fixed kenning of a few words that glosses one ogham letter. Three complete sets survive in medieval Irish manuscripts, attributed to Morann mac Moin, Mac ind Oc and Cu Chulainn. They sometimes disagree, which gives you more than one angle on the same fid. They work much like the kennings of early Irish and Norse poetry, naming a thing by its most striking quality.
What does the ogham letter Dair mean?
Dair is the ogham letter D, its tree is the oak, and its kenning is ardam dossaib, highest of bushes. Readers take Dair for endurance, settled authority, doors and thresholds, and things that carry weight over long spans. You might draw it when you are being asked to hold steady. In Irish tradition the oak is linked to kingship and sacred assembly sites, and the word dair sits inside place names such as Doire, meaning oak grove, which roots the letter in the landscape.
What does the ogham letter Straif mean?
Straif is the ogham letter for Z or a sound reconstructed as st or sw. Its tree is the blackthorn, and its name appears to mean sulphur. Readers take Straif for necessity that cannot be argued with, punishment, hard fate and the thorn you did not see. Blackthorn's black bark, savage spines and bitter sloes reinforce it. It is the fid most often read as an unwelcome message in modern ogham divination, though like any reading it describes a pressure, not a fixed outcome.
How does ogham divination work in modern practice?
If you are thinking of trying ogham yourself, the basic idea is simple: letters on wood, a question in your mind, and a draw or a throw.
Modern ogham divination puts the twenty feda, or all twenty-five including the forfeda, onto separate pieces of wood, then draws or casts them to answer a question.
Drawing. Reach into a bag without looking, pull a set number of staves, lay them out in order, and read each by its position.
Casting. Hold the whole set, focus on your question, and scatter the staves onto a cloth. Read only the ones that land face up. Weigh which fell near the center and which near the edge, and notice which staves touch or point at each other. Readers who cast usually mark the cloth with rings or quarters so where a stave lands carries meaning too.
Cards. A third approach uses ogham as an oracle deck, one fid per card. You lose the physical fall but keep the letter set.
The reading itself draws on the tree lore, the briatharogaim kennings, or both.
The physical set matters more in ogham than in most card systems, because the material is part of the meaning.
Many readers build their set slowly, gathering a fallen branch from each named tree so the birch fid is birch and the yew fid is yew. That can take a year or more, and it pushes you into a real relationship with the actual plants. Staves are usually cut to the same length of a few inches, flattened on one face, and kept in a drawstring bag. Some practitioners call it a crane bag, after the treasure bag of Irish legend. Others use a single wood throughout, arguing that sameness keeps the focus on the letters rather than the grain.
Practitioners also strongly prefer one clear question at a time, because ogham's answers tend to be short. A tarot card gives you a whole scene to read. A fid gives you a name, a tree and a kenning. It rewards a specific question far more than an open one.
Do you read reversed ogham staves?
Some practitioners read reversals and others ignore them, so decide before you start. Those who read them treat an upside-down fid as the meaning blocked, delayed or turned inward. Those who ignore them point out that ogham letters change identity when flipped, since stroke position defines the letter, so a reversed stave risks being read as a different letter entirely.
How many ogham staves should you draw?
Most readings use one, three or five staves. A single fid answers a direct question or sets the tone of your day. Three staves usually cover the situation, the obstacle and the outcome, or past, present and future. Five gives a fuller layout with a root and a crown. Large casts of the whole set are kept for broad life questions where you want to see clustering rather than sequence.
What woods are used for ogham staves?
Traditionally, the trees the letters name: birch for Beith, rowan for Luis, alder for Fern, willow for Sail, oak for Dair, hazel for Coll, blackthorn for Straif and yew for Idad. Where a named plant is not a tree, such as gorse for Onn or heather for Ur, readers use a stem, a root or a nearby wood instead. Yew requires care, as the plant is toxic.
What ogham spreads and casting layouts do readers use?
Choosing a spread is really choosing how much you want to hear at once.
The single fid. One stave for one question. It is the standard daily draw, the one you might pull with your morning coffee.
The three-fid line. Read left to right as situation, influence and outcome, or as root, trunk and crown.
The five-fid tree layout. It borrows the shape of a tree: one stave for the roots, what the matter grows from; one for the trunk, where things stand now; two for the branches, the paths open to you; and one for the crown, where it tends.
The full cast. Use a cloth marked with rings. Staves in the innermost ring speak to the heart of the matter, the middle ring to circumstances, and the outer ring to distant or background influences. Staves that fall off the cloth are set aside as not relevant. Some readers add a quartered cloth so direction carries meaning as well.
Two reading habits belong to ogham and do not carry over from card systems.
Family clustering. If a cast throws several staves from one aicme, that family's character colors the whole reading. A cluster from aicme Beithe is often read as beginnings and the raw material of a situation. A cluster from aicme Ailme, the vowels, is read as your inner state rather than outside events. You will notice it when three or four vowels land together and the reading suddenly feels personal.
Contact and direction. Two staves that physically touch are read as one combined message, and a stave whose strokes point toward another is read as acting on it. Readers using the ringed cloth also note whether a fid landed on a boundary between rings, which is commonly read as a matter in transition.
Because the ogham set is small, repeats happen often across sessions. Keeping a written record of which feda keep returning for the same question is a standard part of the practice. What keeps showing up for you?
What is the ogham three-fid spread?
Draw three staves and lay them in a line, read left to right. The most common reading is situation, obstacle and outcome. A tree-based version reads them as root, trunk and crown, which suits questions about how something grew. Because the set has only twenty or twenty-five pieces, three feda already sample a big share of it, so each position carries more weight than in a three-card tarot pull.
How do you read an ogham cast on a cloth?
Look only at the staves that land face up, and weigh them by distance from the center. Staves nearest the center speak to the core of your question, those further out to circumstance and background, and staves that land off the cloth are discarded. Touching staves are read as a single combined message, and a stave pointing at another is read as influencing it.
Can ogham be used as an oracle card deck?
Yes, and several published sets do exactly that. The Celtic Tree Oracle by Liz and Colin Murray, published in 1988, put the twenty feda and the five forfeda on twenty-five cards and became the best-known ogham deck. Cards keep the letter set and tree associations but drop the positional information of a cast, which suits readers who prefer spreads in a sequence.
What in ogham is historical and what is modern invention?
If you care about using ogham honestly, it helps to know exactly which parts are old and which are new.
Historically documented: the twenty letters and their sound values, the four aicmi structure, the roughly four hundred stone inscriptions with their name formulas, the medieval letter names, the briatharogaim kennings, the forfeda, and the cipher scales in the Ogam Tract of the Book of Ballymote.
Modern invention: the thirteen-month Celtic tree calendar, the tree birth signs drawn from it, the linking of the four aicmi to the four elements, and using ogham as a divination system drawn from a bag.
The tree calendar comes from Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess appeared in 1948 and reordered the ogham letters into a lunar year of thirteen months. Graves presented it as a recovered druidic secret. Celticists have rejected it consistently, and Damian McManus's A Guide to Ogam in 1991 laid out the language-based case against reading the letter names as a mainly botanical scheme at all.
None of that makes modern ogham divination illegitimate. It makes it modern.
The honest position is that ogham divination is a twentieth-century practice built on genuine medieval materials. That is different from a fraud, and different from an unbroken tradition. Think of a new house built from the stones of an old one.
Irish literature does contain divinatory ogham. In Tochmarc Etaine, the druid Dalan cuts ogham on yew wands and uses them to find where Etain has been hidden, a passage often quoted as the keys of divination. In the Tain Bo Cuailnge, Cu Chulainn cuts ogham on a withe and on a forked branch and sets them in the path of Medb's army as a binding challenge. That is ogham as legal and magical constraint, not as an oracle. Both are literary scenes written centuries after the stones.
Practitioners who want to work responsibly tend to say which layer they are using: the kennings, the medieval tree glosses, Graves, or their own. Naming the layer costs you nothing and keeps the reading honest. That matters more in ogham than in systems with no historical record to misrepresent. Which layer speaks to you?
Is the Celtic tree calendar authentic?
No, not to medieval Ireland. Robert Graves built it in The White Goddess, published in 1948, by mapping ogham letters onto thirteen lunar months. No medieval Irish source describes such a calendar, and Celtic scholarship has rejected it. It stays popular because it is elegant and easy to remember, and it underlies the tree birth sign charts that circulate widely online.
Were the four aicmi linked to the four elements historically?
No medieval Irish source links them. The four-by-five structure is a design feature of the script, most likely reflecting a grammarian's sorting of sounds. Assigning aicme Beithe to earth or aicme Ailme to spirit is a modern overlay borrowed from ceremonial magic and tarot suit thinking. It can be useful in practice, but it is not historical.
Did druids use ogham?
There is no direct evidence. The historical druids belong to a period that ends around the time ogham inscriptions begin, and the stones carry only names. Irish literature written in the Christian period does show druids cutting ogham on wands for divination and for binding. Modern druid orders such as OBOD and AODA teach ogham, but as a revived practice rather than an inherited one.
Questions people ask
How many letters are in the ogham alphabet?
Twenty original letters, arranged in four families of five called aicmi. A fifth family of five extra letters, the forfeda, was added later and appears mostly in manuscripts rather than on stone, bringing the full manuscript alphabet to twenty-five characters. That is why several modern ogham divination sets and card decks have twenty-five pieces instead of twenty.
Is ogham a real ancient script or a modern invention?
Ogham is a genuine ancient script. Roughly four hundred inscribed ogham stones survive in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, the Isle of Man and southwest England, most cut between the fourth and sixth centuries in Primitive Irish. What is modern is the divination. The letters, the stones and the tree names are historical, while drawing ogham staves from a bag to answer a question is a twentieth-century development.
Why is ogham called the celtic tree alphabet?
Because medieval Irish scholars attached tree and shrub names to the letters, and because the script's own vocabulary is woody. A single ogham letter is a fid, meaning wood or tree, and the set is the feda. Around eight of the twenty names are securely trees, including beith for birch, dair for oak and coll for hazel. The rest were fitted to trees by later commentators.
Was ogham ever used for divination in ancient Ireland?
There is no archaeological evidence for it. Every surviving inscription is a name or a memorial formula, not an oracle. Irish literature does describe the druid Dalan cutting ogham on yew wands in the tale Tochmarc Etaine to find the missing Etain, which is a divination scene, but it is a story written centuries after the stones were carved. Modern ogham divination builds on that literary hint rather than on documented practice.
What is the difference between ogham and Norse runes?
They are unrelated scripts built differently. Ogham letters are groups of one to five strokes placed against a stemline, so the script is systematic and countable. Runes are individual angular shapes with no shared building block. Ogham writes Primitive Irish and later Old Irish, while runes write Germanic languages. Ogham is also read upward along a stone edge, whereas runic inscriptions usually run horizontally.
How do you make a set of ogham staves?
Cut twenty or twenty-five short lengths of wood, sand one face flat, and carve or burn a single letter on each along a drawn stemline. Many readers gather each stave from the tree that matches its letter, so the birch stave is birch and the oak stave is oak, which turns making the set into a long seasonal project. Others use one wood throughout so the set looks uniform.
Where can you see original ogham stones today?
Original ogham stones stand in fields and museums across Ireland, with counties Kerry, Cork and Waterford holding the densest clusters. University College Cork keeps a well-known collection in its Stone Corridor, and the Ballycrovane stone in west Cork still stands at over five meters. The Discovery Programme's Ogham in 3D project has laser-scanned many surviving stones and put the models online for close reading.
What does today hold for you?
Pop in your birthday. Your reading shows up right here. No email, no account.
Try it for yourself, free
Related topics: ogham, ogham alphabet, celtic tree alphabet, ogham divination, ogham meanings, ogham stones, ogham letters
