The Five Stones of Dinglebury

Poststructural Pub
1




I mentioned a while ago that some friends of mine traveled around Germany this past summer.
On the way home they spent some time in England, and happened to pass through the tiny town
of Dinglebury. It’s in a very rural area not too far from Dover. It’s one of those “blink and you’ll
miss it” sorts of places, but their attention was caught by a group of people by the side of the road,
clustered around a tall marker stone and poking at it with tweezers. My friends are very chatty,
and soon found out that these were archaeologists–who were doing some rather tedious work and
were glad to be interrupted. They wound up in a pub and got the whole story.

Apparently Dinglebury was an outpost during the Anglo-Saxon invasions. It has all sorts of historical
remnants from that time period, but nothing written. Just recently though, someone took pictures
of some marker stones using infra-red imagery, and found that there were written inscriptions under
the thick layer of moss. The archaeologists were going through the delicate and tedious process of
removing the moss. It seemed likely that the inscriptions were in Anglo-Saxon Futhork,

…and the inscriptions appeared to be some form of verse, but that was all they knew at that point.


My friends asked the archaologists to let them know what the results were. Just last week they
received a copy of the newly-published research paper about the Five Stones of Dinglebury.
Here’s some illustrations from that paper.

The inscriptions on the first 2 stones

The second and third stones

the 5th stone

The archeologists are puzzling over the meaning of this strange form of verse.
Oddly enough, more marker stones of a similar type have been discovered a few miles down the road!

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have they found any ancient paintings on the sides of barns yet???

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My cat used to have dingle-berries. I thought that what this thread was about. Instead, it’s about Fred Flintstone.

Willllma!

4

Is that a dingleberry in your avatar?

5

Do you think that was carved by King Kongker?

T

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…or are you just happy to see me?

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Certainly not! :astonished: It’s an eyespot from a luna moth wing! :laughing:




Well, my friends did bring a bag back for me as a souvenir.

What am I supposed to do with them? Use them in muffins? or plant fertilizer?

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The word “BURMA” among the lettering fascinates me, although, I have to admit, I’ve never heard of these stones.
Could Britain have had visitors from Burma, prior to the Roman invasion? Perhaps it would go to explain the long-standing connection between Britain and the Indian sub-continent.

But I can’t help suspecting it maybe part of a more cryptic message, in the traditional British style. Nowadays “BURMA” on the envelope of a letter is taken to mean “Be Undressed, Ready, My Angel”. The words and the message could not have been the same, but perhaps there was some kind of cryptic acronym.

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I have never heard this. Perhaps that’s bad.

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You know what it’s like in the UK: mindset still in the second world war. I don’t think it’s been used much since then.
Other favourites are:

Windsor: When I’m near, Darling, Strip off Regalia

and

Norwich: (K)nickers off ready when I come home.