Michael, what is this stone?

 

Well, it is a small Roman column, but what's very different about it is it's got this inscription on it in Ogham. And this transliterates to a man's name, Tepicatus. And here on this line, he is beginning to describe his lineage, just as you’d find on any Ogham stone. 

 

I mean I have seen this, you know, tucked away graveyards in Ireland or in the middle of fields surrounded by trees. But there it is, an hour’s drive from London.

 

Yes, away away away from other finds of such stones. 

 

It's extraordinary to me, this idea that you have an Irishman who sets out, settles among people from everywhere, from all corners of the empire. 

 

It truly was a multi-cultural, multi-lingual world you have lived. 

 

And it’s not just the one person, but it's a group, it's a family, and it's other people supporting a community. Now it may be he was big figure. He was a local king, I mean who knows?  Because we have another Celtic man from another end of Roman town story up in Wroxeter who did describe himself as a king. So you may have had an Irishman who had his domain here in those sort of end days of the Roman world in the fifth, sixth century. 

 

The Roman Empire in which Tepicatus lived was already in decline. But its impact was still profound. Christianity had become the state religion. Clerics were dispatched all over the Europe to spread the word.

 

The faith that would come to be seen as a core part of Irish identity was brought to an island steeped in the worship of pagan gods. Roman's first bishop to Ireland was dispatched in A.D. 431. He was Palladius, the son of a Roman general who found by one account that the fierce and cruel man did not receive his doctrine readily.