Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire, England has in its grounds an 18th-century monument commissioned by Admiral George Anson, 1st Baron Anson, bearing an inscription that is thought to be an uncracked ciphertext.

The Shepherd's Monument carries a relief that shows a woman watching three shepherds pointing to a tomb. On the tomb is depicted the Latin text Et in arcadia ego (And I am in Arcadia, too). The relief is based on a painting by the French artist Nicholas Poussin, known itself as Et in Arcadia ego, but the relief has a number of modifications — most noticeably that it is reversed horizontally. Other differences include a change to which letter of the tomb a shepherd is pointing to and the addition of an extra sarcophagus to the scene.

Below the relief is the mysterious inscription:

    O•U•O•S•V•A•V•V
D•                   M•

Theories of the inscription's meaning include a message to a deceased lover or merely a deliberately intriguing decoration. For adherents of the modern Grail-conspiracy legend, the inscription holds a clue to the location of the Holy Grail.

Several decryptions of the inscription have been suggested — for example, a sub-sequence of the letters apparently matches the first letters of a phrase in the Latin Bible — but none are overwhelmingly convincing and due to the shortness of the ciphertext it is not possible to have any confidence in their accuracy.

As of now, the meaning of the monument remains hidden.

External links

• Images of the monument
• Bletchley Park annouces possible solutions to the Shugborough code mystery