While tending to his garden in 2020, a geography teacher in Coventry, England, unearthed a sandstone measuring four inches long. The sandstone featured deeply carved parallel lines on its surface.

“It caught my eye as I was clearing an overgrown part of the garden,” Senior said in a statement per Live Science. “At first, I thought it was some kind of calendar.” 

It turned out that the parallel lines carved into the sandstone were ogham, an ancient written language native to Ireland. 

“Finding out later it was an ogham stone and over 1,600 years old was incredible,” Senior said, per the source. 

Senior reported his discovery to the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

“This is an amazing find. The beauty of the Portable Antiquities Scheme is that people are finding stuff that keeps rewriting our history,” said Teresa Gilmore, archaeologist and finds liaison officer for Staffordshire and West Midlands based at Birmingham Museums, per the Irish Times.

“This particular find has given us a new insight into early medieval activity in Coventry, which we still need to make sense of. Each find like this helps in filling in our jigsaw puzzle and gives us a bit more information,” she continued. 

Archaeologists remain unsure about how the stone ended up in the  

“There’s a lot of possibilities as to why it came over,” Gilmore said, per Live Science. “This is one of the things about some of the amazing finds that turn up; they often create more questions than answers.”

In early 2024, the stone was brought to Katherine Forsyth, from the University of Glasgow, who translated part of the script. 

She translated the script into the name: “Mael Dumcail.” 

Senior has donated the stone to the in Coventry. The artifact will be part of the until April 2025. 

“We might never know how Mael lost the stone and how it ended up in a garden in Coventry, but I hope future research will reveal more,” Herbert museum curator Ali Wells said in a statement, per Live Science.