Lunnasting stone

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

[1][2] The Pictish inscription has been read as: The script probably contains the personal name "Nechtan", and Diack (1925) took the view that the last two words mean “the vassal of Nehtonn“[4] but it is otherwise without certain interpretation.

[1] 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.

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".

[11] The criticisms focus on random readings being assigned to Ogam letters, alleged complete decipherment of inscriptions too weathered to be read with certainty, the use of 20th century Basque rather than reconstructed Proto-Basque forms, disregarding syntax and highly fanciful translations.