Lunnasting stone

The Lunnasting stone is a stone bearing an ogham inscription, found at Lunnasting, Shetland and donated to the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland in 1876.

It was found by Rev. J.C. Roger in a cottage, who stated that the stone had been unearthed from a "moss" (i.e. a peat bog) in April 1876, having been originally discovered five feet (1.5 m) below the surface.

The stone is made of slate and is 44 inches (1.1 m) long, by about 13 inches (0.33 m) in breadth and 1 inch (2.5 cm) thick with the inscription on the flat surface. In addition to the ogham letters which are arranged down a centre line, there is a small cruciform mark near the top of the stone, which may be a runic letter or a Christian cross. It is unknown whether this mark and the ogham are contemporary, or whether the former was later added to a pre-existing standing stone.

The Pictish inscription has been read as:

The script probably contains the personal name "Nechton", and Diack (1925) took the view that the last two words mean “the vassal of Nehtonn“ but it is otherwise without certain interpretation. Forsyth suggests Ahehhttannn is also a personal name.

Other recent attempts include:

The word-dividing dots suggest Norse influence, but this could pre-date the Viking occupation of Shetland, and an eighth- or ninth-century origin is likely for the ogham work.

The difficulties of providing a clear interpretation of the script has led to a number of other suggestions.

Vincent (1896) suggests that the stone may have been erected by "Irish missionary monks not earlier than A.D. 580" and quotes an unnamed expert's transcription of the ogham as:

Lockwood (1975) writes that "the last word is clearly the commonly occurring name Nechton, but the rest, even allowing for the perhaps arbitrary doubling of consonants in Ogam, appears so exotic that philologists conclude that Pictish was a non-Indo-European language of unknown affinities". This view was also taken of the ogham inscribed on the Orcadian Buckquoy spindle-whorl until its 1995 interpretation as Old Irish.

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