FOR two-and-a-half centuries it has stood in a glade at a stately home in Staffordshire, defying the efforts of code breakers, classical scholars and amateur sleuths to unlock its secrets.

Now, at last, the mystery of inscriptions carved on the Shepherds’ Monument at Shugborough Hall, ancestral home of the earls of Lichfield, has been solved — well, possibly.

Following a competition launched earlier this summer, some of the most convincing explanations for the inscribed picture in reverse and a seemingly random series of letters will be presented this week by Bletchley Park, the centre that made its name cracking Hitler’s Enigma code.

Bletchley itself is cautiously supporting a theory from a professional codebreaker whose job does not permit him to disclose his identity. He argues that the inscription points to the hiding place of a stone tablet handed down from the Old Testament prophet Jacob, which was a talisman for a secret society known as the Priory of Sion.

According to this theory, the 18th-century admiral who built the monument and was reputed to be a member of the priory captured the tablet from a French ship. He then buried it on an island off the coast of what is now Nova Scotia, Canada.

“The person who drew up this solution has considerable professional experience in codebreaking and his logic hangs together well,” said Christine Large, director of Bletchley Park. “We think this theory is about the most convincing we have seen so far.”

The Nova Scotia theory comes from one of more than 130 respondents to the challenge from countries as far apart as Iceland and Australia. Even GCHQ, the government surveillance and cipher-breaking centre in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, has contributed.

The mystery centres on a stone monument commissioned in the mid-18th century by George Anson. He was a sailor and an ancestor of Patrick Lichfield, the society photographer and present earl, who has an apartment in the house.

Anson circumnavigated the globe, fought the French off the coast of America and won a famous naval victory off Cape Finisterre, which brought him a reward of £300,000 for capturing one of the ships.

He used the money to rebuild Shugborough and a series of monuments in its gardens. The Shepherds’ Monument incorporates a carved mirror image of Arcadian Shepherds, a painting by Nicolas Poussin, the 17th-century French artist, which is now in the Louvre.

The monument appears to show two lovers listening to an elderly shepherd who reads them an inscription on a tomb: Et in Arcadia Ego (And I in Arcadia). The message of the picture is often interpreted as being that there is no situation in life that death will not one day snatch from us.

The cryptic inscription below the main panel was a subject for speculation by both Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, who spent many hours trying to crack its inner meaning.

The official website for Shugborough, which is owned by the National Trust and run by Staffordshire county council, says it “defies interpretation”. It consists of the letters DOUOSVAVVM, with the first and last letters set lower than the rest.

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