A day at the beach is meant to relax and rejuvenate, a small escape from the world but what happens when your little escape comes with an ominous warning from the past engraved in stone?
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In 2019, beachgoers in Brittany, France were met with this question and while trying to find an answer, they got sucked into a century-old warning about destruction, death and danger.
A The Small Town
In northwestern France, on the coast of Brittany, is a small town called Plougastel-Daoulas. It is a sleepy hideaway with only 13,000 residents and is famous for its strawberries not for its mysteries or so they thought.
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Before 2019, Plougastel-Daoulas was famous for its 15th-century church and significant harbours, which had abandoned forts that were used during the French Revolution and both World Wars. But it wasn’t these historical landmarks that made headlines.
The Tide Lowered,
The town had carefully hidden this mystery for centuries and had no idea that all it would have taken to uncover this centuries-old mystery would be a low tide! While locals were left reeling, having had no idea that their sleepy town hid such a mystery.
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According to The Daily Mail, it was actually discovered in 2014 but due to the confusing nature of the mystery residents had no idea how to respond. The three-foot slab of granite had been a curious site for locals but not one which elicited worldwide attention.
What Did It Say?
It was only when the “curious slab” was reported to the city and an official investigation began into the slab’s history, did the residents learn the true scope of what they had found and how this piece of rock was going to change the town’s history forever.
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Experts removed the lichen that had built up around the slab and used chalk to make the engravings more visible. The words roughly translated to, “ROC AR B … DRE AR GRIO SE EVELOH AR VIRIONES BAOAVEL” and “OBBIIE: BRISBVILAR … FROIK … AL.”
Several Different Languages
Confused? So were the experts. Due to erosion, a large chunk of the original description was missing but one thing was rather clear, the date or should we say dates, 1786 and 1787.
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The rock also featured two crude images, one of a sailboat and one of a sacred heart with a cross. Overall, experts had 20 lines of ancient texts and two images, together all of it seemed illegible but that only helped build the riddle further.
The Language
Amidst conflicting theories, the historians did come to agree on one thing – the language. To them, it appeared to be written partly in Breton, a Celtic language that travellers brought from Britain in the Early Middle Ages.
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A language which the French government, at the time, tried their best to destroy and sadly, succeeded at it as well. Only 200,000 people speak it today which makes Breton one of the hardest languages to translate.
Layered Mystery
Another aspect of complexity is added when we take into account the fact that, Breton did not use standard spellings like most other spoken languages from the 18th century. Translating the inscription went from hard to impossible.
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There was still some home though like we mentioned above, the slab actually had two dates and each date had a different language. The other was believed to be Welsh, but again because of the erosion, it was difficult to tell.
Ominous Letters
The more experts researched the slab, the more confused they got – for instance, mixed in with the Breton were Scandinavian letter, Ø present and some letters were written upside down and even backwards!
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Breton specialist François-Pol Castel was the first call officials made to help them learn more about the slab. He confirmed that most of the words were Breton, some of which were “nest,” “clay,” and “forever.”
First Translation
When Castel analyzed the engraving, he could only translate the top line. According to him, it reads, “Through these words, you will see the truth.” “So it is very mysterious, isn’t it?” he said during an interview.
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He went on to identify at least 20 words that were Breton but in the grand scheme of things, the discovery wasn’t as groundbreaking as many hoped since the slab still had lines upon lines of untranslated words left.
Plougastel-Daoulas Mystery
The news about the Plougastel-Daoulas mystery spread further and further, with everyone from amateur investigators to historians visiting the town to try their luck at solving the great puzzle.
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Castel stayed to help and came up with an explanation as to why the boulder was so hard to translate. He explained that Breton was mainly a spoken language, not a written one and the words might just have been spelt phonetically.
The Date
While this was considered to be one of the theories, the reality was that the more publicity the boulder got, the more “explanations” came forward by experts. Though one thing everyone agreed upon and that was the date.
The engraving was considered to be 250 years old, likely dating back to 1786 and 1787, the same dates inscribed on the rock. Experts agreed that learning more about this time period would only help them uncover the mystery further.
A Tough Time
This was a period of great turmoil in France. After accruing debt in the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, the country was in a financial crisis. And with the boulder being located on the shore of Brest harbour, experts could deduce who could have inscribed the slab.
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A few military forts also stood in the harbour. In particular, an ancient army base called Fort du Corbeau or Crow’s Fort sits only 1/4 miles away from the famous rock. All these signs led to the fact that whoever wrote the inscription was a soldier or worked in the military.
Criticism
Unlike most other mysteries which lose interest as time goes on, this one only grew. Many criticized the expert’s inability to come to a conclusion. They did know one thing and that was explained by Michel Paugam, the local heritage and historical site manager.
“It takes time to engrave like that, at least several days,” he said. This simple line would end up giving researchers more detail into the history of the slab than ever before. A closer look at the stone revealed that the engraver was devoted to the project and it clearly meant a lot of them.
One Sure Deduction
“[The authors] had expertise in sculpting and the material,” says Paugam. “Writing we’re less sure; it’s possible someone else was telling the engraver what to do, but they were definitely from the profession. They knew how to etch into stone.”
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Also, it was noted that the engraver wanted the world to see his work! The rock was even visible during high tide, suggesting that the slab was strategically used! Experts were getting closer and closer to uncovering this mystery.
The Real Issue
“Maybe people working in the fort had free time to come here in the evening,” Paugam theorized. “Perhaps they set up a campfire over there, a picnic over there, and one of them worked on the inscription.”
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While experts had figured out the background of the boulder, they still could not translate it.. just yet. “It might be a mix of several languages or even codes that would have been familiar to members of certain professions, particularly among sculptors,” says town council member Stéphane Michel.
A New Take
Local historians believed that the other language might have been Spanish, Catalan, or even Russian. After months of no concrete answer, Mayor Dominique Cap was unable to provide the curious public with a proper answer.
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“We’ve asked historians and archaeologists from around here, but no one has been able to work out the story behind the rock,” he said. “So we thought, maybe, out there in the world, there are people who’ve got the kind of expert knowledge that we need. Rather than stay in ignorance, we said, ‘Let’s launch a competition.’”
The Competition
And so, in May 2019, the town council of Plougastel-Daoulas launched an international competition to understand the engraving. They decided to offer €2,000 ($2,200 USD) to the winning theory and of course, every theory would have to first be reviewed by a jury of town council members, historians, archaeologists, and Breton language specialists to win.
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The contest was called The Champollion Mystery of Plougastel-Daoulas after Jean-François Champollion, the linguist who helped translate the Rosetta Stone. And soon enough, the town was flooded with people and over 2000 participants.
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Town council member Véronique Martin–who came up with the idea became responsible for reviewing the theories and within a month, she had narrowed down the entries to only 61 entries with over 1,500 pages of theories.
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While most submissions were from France, others came from the United States, Belgium, the United Arab Emirates, and Thailand! And with such diverse applicants, there were bound to be a wacky theory or two.
Mixed Response
One applicant went as far as studying the religions of families in that area and proposed that the engraving was a prayer to Jesus for protection. They did not give any specific explanation as to how they had come to this conclusion.
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Another theory said that the engraving could be dated back to the 1100s, making the language Old Gaelic, not Old Breton and all the 7’s in the inscription were 1’s. And Véronique researched into each and every one of these theories to find the two which had the most historical backing.
The Winners
Martin said that the contest “mainly attracted treasure hunters or people who are passionate about research and solving mysteries.” and finally, in February 2020 the council revealed the names of the two winners in the French newspaper Ouest-France.
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Both theories were considered to be “very similar” by the Mayor, yet had enough nuisances present which forced the council to come up with a tie between the two entries. They both agreed that the slab was a memorial for a man who died.
The First Theory
This came from Noël René Toudic, an English teacher and Celtic language expert. He proposed that the writer was a semi-literate man who wrote in 18th-Century Breton. Toudic’s translation read, “Serge died when, with no skill at rowing, his boat was tipped over by the wind.”
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He explained further that the numbers etched on the stone were the date when he passed away. According to Toudic, the memorial was for a man named Serge Le Bris. He signed the memorial with his last name and included the date: May 8, 1786. Toudic believes that Haloteau was a soldier, and possibly Serge too, given the boulder’s proximity to Crow’s Fort.
Second Theory
The second winners were a team, author Roger Faligot and comic artist Alain Robet. The two also proposed that the inscription was a memorial, but they had a different and rather darker than Toudic.
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Their translation read, “He was the incarnation of courage and joie de vivre. Somewhere on the island, he was struck, and he is dead.” Joie de vivre means “zest for life” in French. They also suggested that the second language is Welsh.
More Details
According to their theory, the man who died was a soldier who passed away during a battle. They further explained that perhaps his friends got together and engraved a tombstone for him.
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But unlike the first theory, the duo does not think the deceased man was a sailor and insist that the engraving hints at foul play at hand. While both these theories came very close to decoding the granite slab, in the end, no one had completely succeeded at solving the mystery.
Still Searching
“There is still a way to go to solve the mystery completely,” Cap told Agence France-Presse and he isn’t wrong. One-fifth of the engraving has still not been translated due to the difficulties in understanding the ancient language.
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Although there is much work to be done, Mayor Cap seems optimistic and said, “We have made a great step.” and we agree with him. Hopefully, the next time we see this 250-year-old boulder is when we finally fully uncover its ancient mystery.