Ancient Irish graffiti and a standing stone

As a fairly regular 'stone botherer' I'll always try to see some stone circles, burial mounds, landscape features etc when I'm out and about somewhere. This time my travels took me to the beautiful south west of Ireland and despite limited time, I was able to see something really special. The 'Ballycrovane stone' is the tallest ogham stone in Ireland, stands 4.7m (or 5m something depending on what website you read) in height in an area with amazing views of the surrounding hills and water below. As a standing stone alone, its impressive given its height and fairly spectactualr location but what makes it really interesting is the carving along one of its edges in the Ogham runic script. Ogham is an ancient runic writing system from around the 5th century theoretically used to write ancient Irish (Proto-Goidelic) as apposed to the later 'Old Irish'. However its structure and vowel sounds, suggests it may also have been used to write Latin and other non Gaelic scripts including Norse (on…