The Westford Knight Has Been Arguing With the History Books for 150 Years

The knight lies flat on his back on Depot Street, sword laid down his body, shield across his chest, a few steps from the Abbot School in Westford, Massachusetts. He's bronze, he weighs about 500 pounds, and he's been there since 2015. The mystery he guards sits right behind him: a weathered rock ledge under a protective cover, where believers say a real knight was carved into the stone more than 600 years ago — and where skeptics say there's barely a carving at all. The argument is an old one, and it's having another week: a Sentinel & Enterprise feature on the Westford Knight has been picked up by the Boston Herald, putting the stone in front of a fresh audience.

Start with what the believers see, because in the right light they see a lot. Pecked into the ledge is the outline of a sword — pommel, grip, cross-guard and blade — and around it, traced in punch holes, the figure of a knight in a bascinet helmet, the style worn in northern Britain between about 1375 and 1400. His shield is said to carry the arms of Clan Gunn of Caithness, Scotland. In the telling that has grown up around the stone since the 1950s, the figure is an effigy: a memorial carved for a knight who died here in 1399.

The knight, in that telling, is Sir James Gunn, and he didn't get to Massachusetts by accident. Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, is said to have sailed west in 1398 — a voyage later writers matched to the Zeno brothers' account of a prince called Zichmni — wintered in Nova Scotia, and come south to Massachusetts, where one of his party died on an inland trip to Prospect Hill, about a mile from the ledge. His companions, the story goes, carved his likeness where he fell, broken sword and all, almost a full century before Columbus reached the Caribbean. A granite monument beside the ledge, erected in 1976, states the story as fact, and a second carved stone — a ship, an arrow and the number 184 — sits at the town library, read by believers as directions to Sinclair's campsite.

None of that was the first reading of the rock. The carving enters print in the 1870s, when Elias Nason's gazetteer of Massachusetts described markings locals took for Native American work. In 1946, William Goodwin, the promoter behind New Hampshire's Mystery Hill, read the clearest marks as a broken Viking sword. The knight himself arrived in 1954, when Frank Glynn, president of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut, chalked in the full figure, and British archaeologist T. C. Lethbridge identified the sword as a 14th-century hand-and-a-half design and the shield as Gunn heraldry. Frederick Pohl's 1974 book on Sinclair's expedition carried the story to a national audience, and in 1999 retired Massachusetts state geologist Joseph Sinnott concluded, after extensive examination, that a sword and other images really had been carved into the ledge.

Mainstream scholarship is not persuaded, and it isn't close. The Sinclair voyage rests on the Zeno letters, published in the 1550s and regarded by most historians as a fabrication by their publishers. Archaeologist Kenneth Feder, who has studied the site, is among the unconvinced, pointing to how fast exposed New England stone weathers. Modern examinations credit the sword's handle as a genuine carving but read most of the rest of the figure as glacial scratches — the same ice-sheet scoring found on ledges all over New England — and the rock is not thought to have been reachable in the 1300s, when it likely sat under feet of soil. The summary of the scholarly position is blunt: there is no evidence for the claim.

Westford, to its credit, refuses to pick a side. The Westford Museum presents the theories and lets visitors decide, and a plaster cast and a relief of the carving are on display there for anyone who wants a clearer look than the weathered original allows. What the town has done is protect the place. The Westford Remembers Memorial Fund has built the site up with its marker, its protective cover and the bronze knight — sculpted by local firefighter David P. Christiana and paid for with private donations, including money from Clan Gunn in Britain and Clan Sinclair in the United States — so the argument survives in good condition even as the carving keeps fading.

So the stone sits where it has always sat, at the edge of Depot Street, giving every generation the same Rorschach test. If the believers are right, a Scottish knight has been lying in Massachusetts since before Columbus, and the history books are missing a chapter. If the skeptics are right, the knight is a story New England told itself so well that it eventually needed a bronze statue. Either way, people keep stopping the car — and on the evidence of this week, they aren't done arguing about it.