The code sits beneath a marble relief in the gardens of the ancestral home of the Earls of Lichfield in Staffordshire. It has foxed generations of people from Darwin to Dickens.

The Shepherd’s Monument was commissioned by Thomas Anson in 1748. It is a beautiful marble tablet, some 20 feet high.  It depicts a mirror-image likeness of a painting by artist Nicholas Poussin, showing a group of shepherds and shepherdesses contemplating the next world. Beneath the tablet lies the inscription added by Thomas, laid out on two lines with ten letters separated by dots – indicating that whole words follow each letter.

Poussin was rumoured to be a Grand Master of the Knights Templar, and the original painting, now housed in the Louvre, has caused much speculation over its masonic symbolism. Dan Brown used inspiration from the piece to come up with his bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, while bookshelves in shops are filled with non-fiction purporting to link the painting with mysterious orders and the Holy Grail.

Subtle differences and deliberate alterations in the Shugborough version, along with the addition of the ten letter code, have excited Grail Hunters for centuries.

In May 2004, Shugborough invited World War II codebreakers Bletchley Park to have a look at the inscription. The answer to the code still remains very much an enigma. Can you solve the age-old mystery?

Some interesting websites about our inscription and others include:

www.gradale.com/ansonfamily.htm