William H. Mounsey
William Henry Mounsey (1808 – 3 December 1877) was a British army officer and antiquarian with an interest in Persia and Jewish culture.
[nb 1] He sold his captaincy, returned to England and took over the family business as solicitor, possibly after his father's death.
According to the 1851 census, he was living in Castle Street, Carlisle with his sisters Margaret, Mary and Ann, and was the holder of property chiefly vested in landed security.
[nb 2] He is known for a carved inscription he left on the Dwarfie Stane, a Neolithic rock-cut tomb in an erratic block on the island of Hoy in Orkney.
[4] Mounsey camped here in 1850 and inscribed in Persian script in the sandstone: "I have sat two nights and so learnt patience", this is taken to be a reference to the Highland midge.
In Outhgill (Cumbria) there is a replica made of limestone, called the "Jew Stone",[8] placed in 1989 after the visit of a Jewish traveller, named Shalom Hermon, who saw the broken original in 1984.
The Latin inscription translated reads: "William Mounsey, a lone traveller, commenced his journey at the mouth and finished at the source, fulfilled his vow to the genius and nymphs of the Eden on 15 March 1850".
He carved a 9th-century Welsh verse on the walls of a pre-Roman archaeological site in 1852 and left other inscriptions near the river Eden.
Probably, he was the sculptor of a series of five enigmatic faces cut into the sandstone cliffs of Eden gorge near Armathwaite.
The inscriptions on Hoy (with his name and 1850) and near the river Eden (with 1855) are in the same bold style, have curious texts and are from the same period.
He believed these to represent Caerdroia, or the Walls of Troy, and to be restricted to land occupied by Celtic people.
[11] In 1858 Mounsey drew attention to the description in a Welsh book Drych y Prif Oesoedd (Mirror of the Early Centuries) by Theophilus Evans (1716) of a custom formerly prevalent among Welsh shepherds of cutting in the turf a figure in the form of a labyrinth, a turf maze, which they called Caerdroia.
[12] His study Tales – The Children of Lir and Cath Cluana Tairbh, (1859), and his Welsh version of Purgatorium S. Patricii, c.1860, are held in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.
