Heysham hogback

[5] The first documentary record of the hogback is a mention in the 1811 edition of An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Town of Lancaster, published by Christopher Clark, of its discovery in St Peter's churchyard.

[5][6] A much later account in Edward L. Cutts's A Manual for the Study of the Sepulchral Slabs and Crosses of the Middle Ages (1849) surmises that it was found in the adjoining St Patrick's Chapel.

[5][7] It was kept in the open air in St Peter's churchyard where it suffered erosion from the weather and from the many local children who, over the years, played at taking rides on it.

It is made of Ward's Stone sandstone, a pale brown millstone grit of the Silsden Formation which could have originated anywhere on the Morecambe Bay coast between Heysham and Bolton-le-Sands.

"[14] His own view, given in 1891, was that the subject of the sculpture was the Death of Adam, a story found in certain Islamic legends and in Greek apocryphal Christian sources: the Apocalypse of Moses, the Gospel of Nicodemus, the Acts of Philip.

[15] The same year, Henry Colley March criticised this interpretation, the story of Adam's death being in his view too little-known in the early Middle Ages and capable of explaining too few of the figures on the hogback.

[17] More recently, support has been expressed both for the Ragnarök theory and by others for an interpretation of the carvings as a version of the Biblical story of Adam's naming of the animals, a theme also explored by medieval Irish sculptors.

[19] Andrew White, the curator of Lancaster Museum, has warned that "the only people who are certain about the subject of the Hogback are those who do not know anything about the genre",[20] and the archaeologist B. J. N. Edwards summed up the state of the scholarship thus: "Despite a number of attempts to 'explain' the sculptures, none has yet been put forward which is really convincing, and it has to go down as a 'don't know'.