Ten Letters in a Garden: The Shugborough Inscription No One Can Read

2026-06-20 · Cifrari irrisolti · 8 min di lettura

On the grounds of Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, among clipped lawns and a scattering of neoclassical garden buildings, stands a weathered stone monument known as the Shepherd's Monument. It is not a cathedral or a royal tomb. It is an ornament, put up by a wealthy English family for their own pleasure, and the row of ten letters cut into the stone beneath its carved relief has never been read to anyone's satisfaction. Shugborough lies a few miles east of Stafford, on the edge of Cannock Chase, and the monument sits near the top of most published lists of famous undeciphered inscriptions.

Shugborough had been the seat of the Anson family since 1624. In the middle of the eighteenth century it belonged to Thomas Anson, a Member of Parliament for Lichfield, a traveller and a member of the Society of Dilettanti, the London club of gentlemen with a taste for classical antiquity. He never married and had no children. His younger brother George Anson was a naval officer who in 1740 sailed with a squadron to raid Spanish possessions in the Pacific. The expedition was a disaster in human terms, losing all but one of its ships, and the great majority of the men who sailed died on the way, most of them of scurvy. But in June 1743 George Anson's remaining vessel, the Centurion, captured the Manila treasure galleon Nuestra Senora de Covadonga. He returned to England in 1744 having circumnavigated the globe, and the captured silver was carried through London in a procession of wagons. He became a national figure, later First Lord of the Admiralty, and a very rich man.

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