A Templar knight chalked onto a glacial ledge in 1954
A glacier-scored ledge on Depot Street in Westford, Massachusetts. An 1874 gazetteer mentioned a rude figure supposedly cut by some Indian artist, and an 1883 town history spoke of rough outlines of a human face. In 1946 William Goodwin, owner of the Mystery Hill attraction, read the marks as a broken Viking sword. In 1954 Frank Glynn of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut chalked in a whole medieval knight with sword and shield, and the legend grew from there: a fallen member of Henry Sinclair’s supposed voyage of 1398, perhaps a Knight Templar named Sir James Gunn. There is no evidence the voyage happened, though a stone monument beside the ledge now states it as fact. The archaeologist Kenneth Feder compared the rock with New England gravestones whose lettering has faded to nothing in a few decades: this carving has done the opposite, getting fresher and gaining new details. His reading is a real old carving, glacial grooves, a sword shape punched in later with a metal tool, and a knight who exists only in Glynn’s chalk.
Depot Street, Westford, Massachusetts
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Other places on the map within a couple of hours of here.
