Ten Letters in a Garden: The Shugborough Inscription No One Can Read
In the grounds of Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England, stands an eighteenth-century garden monument with a puzzle cut into its stone. The Shepherd's Monument was commissioned by Thomas Anson, a member of Parliament, paid for in part by his brother, the celebrated Admiral George Anson, and erected around the middle of the 1700s. Its centerpiece is a marble relief by the Flemish sculptor Peter Scheemakers, copying Nicolas Poussin's painting The Shepherds of Arcadia — but reversed, a mirror image of the original, showing figures gathered around a tomb bearing the Latin phrase Et in arcadia ego.
Beneath the relief, a mason carved the letters that made the monument famous: O U O S V A V V, with two more letters, D and M, set on a lower line beneath them. The Anson family left no explanation, no key, and no surviving record of what the sequence was supposed to mean. Two and a half centuries of guessing have followed.
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