The Shugborough inscription

Ten carved letters that Bletchley Park veterans could not crack

In the park at Shugborough Hall stands a monument Thomas Anson commissioned between 1748 and 1756: a rustic arch framing Peter Scheemakers’ relief of Poussin’s Shepherds of Arcadia, reversed as if copied from an engraving, with a tomb carved ET IN ARCADIA EGO. Below it is a plaque of ten letters nobody has satisfactorily explained: O U O S V A V V, with D and M set lower at either end. DM on a Roman tomb means dedicated to the shades. The rest has been read as a widower’s Latin dedication to his wife, a line from Ecclesiastes, a cipher for the name Magdalen, and the coordinates of an island where Admiral George Anson, Thomas’s brother, buried Spanish treasure. In 1982 The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail tied Poussin to the Priory of Sion, and in 2004 the estate brought in two former Bletchley Park codebreakers, Oliver and Shiela Lawn. No conclusive answer emerged. In 2014 the National Trust said five or six people a week told it they had solved the code.