page_title: Silchester Ogham stone
section_title: Dating
hierarchical_section_title: Silchester Ogham stone / Dating
caption_attribution_description: Settlement of the Déisi and Uí Liatháin in Britain
context_page_description: The Silchester Ogham stone is a pillar stone discovered at the Roman town on Calleva Atrebatum in Silchester, Hampshire during excavations in 1893. Thus far it remains the only one of its kind found in England, and the only ogham inscription in England east of Cornwall and Devon. The stone is held in a storage facility of Reading Museum in Reading, Berkshire.
context_section_description: The pewter vessel, when reconstructed, turned out to be "a simple, biconical flagon similar to a few other examples found in southern Britain which can be dated broadly to the fourth and no earlier than the late third century." The most recent version of the translation on the stone is "[The something] of Tebicatus, son of the tribe of N”. The missing word may be "memorial" or, less probably, "land", if the stone were a territorial marker rather than a grave marker. J. A. Baird argues that both archaeological and linguistic evidence suggest that the stone belongs to "the earliest phases of the ogham script", which emerges with contact between late Roman Latin and Old Irish.
  On the basis of existing evidence, Reading University says that the "inscription has been interpreted as an epitaph and it has been variously dated to the fifth and sixth centuries". Baird says that it "could well date to the late fourth or fifth century". This would make it "one of the earliest ogham stones anywhere."
caption: Map of Irish migration to Britain
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