The fourth family of ogham holds the vowels, and it is cut differently from the other three.
How the letter is formed
Ailm opens the fourth family, Aicme Ailme, and is cut as one short stroke crossing the line at a right angle. On a standing stone these characters are often no more than notches on the arris itself, short enough that they need not run onto either face, which is why the fourth family is sometimes described as notched rather than stroked.
Vowels in one family
All five vowels sit together in the fourth family, in the order A, O, U, E, I. That is neither the Latin order nor an order suggested by the sounds, and it is one of the pieces of evidence in the long argument about how the ogham sequence was arrived at. Grouping the vowels and giving them a distinct geometry is, by contrast, an obviously practical decision: a reader scanning a stone can pick out the vowel skeleton of a word before working through the consonants.
The sound
Ailm carries the value A. It is frequent in the surviving corpus of orthodox inscriptions, which consist almost entirely of personal names in the genitive case, cut in Ireland and in Irish-settled parts of Britain and dated on linguistic grounds to roughly the fourth to the sixth centuries.
The silver fir attached to this letter belongs to the manuscript gloss tradition and is recorded separately here.