![]() ![]() ![]() Ogham is written by arranging marks along a constant horizontal axis. I began to question everything, especially the translation. My confidence in Fell’s findings was shattered. The verification of the sun shining through the notch made believers out of a lot of people, including me. Even if the sun’s rays could penetrate so deeply inside, there would have been no notch whatsoever to shine through. Judging from erosion at the point of fracture, the collapse seems to be fairly recent, perhaps within the last couple of centuries.”Īt that time, the rock which today forms the notch would have been a part of the overhang’s roof. Much of it has fallen in, and it probably extended out another ten feet or so. “The overhang doesn’t provide much shelter from the elements now,” I wrote, “however, a thousand years ago it probably did. Then, while looking over my field notebook entry from the first day I visited the Oceana petroglyph, I noticed something different about a familiar passage. I poured over what information I’d gathered, but the only local evidence was the carvings themselves. I tried to imagine why these people were here, how and where they lived. I’d even completed an earlier version of this article, chopped full of all the compelling evidence supporting the claim. I spent the next year learning as much as I could about Ogham and the petroglyphs. “That proves it,” said one of the team members. Using compass readings and astronomical tables, the observation team estimated the sunrise point to be nowhere near a gap in the mountains or any other conceivable type of “notch.” As the sun rose at 9:05 a.m., the team was shocked to see the sun filter through a three-sided notch formed by the side of the overhang and a large rock. He arranged to have observers there at dawn on December 22, 1982, the day of the winter solstice. On the left side of the rock face is a separate inscription, which Fell translated as saying a carving which resembles a sun would be entirely lit on Christmas day as light filtered through a notch. It seemed pretty far-fetched to most, but Fell said he could prove it. Fell, the Wyoming and Boone County carvings tell the story of Christ’s birth. These carvings were likely more than a thousand years old, the article said, written in an old Irish script called “Ogham Consaine.” Fell had earlier written a New York Times Bestseller, America, B.C., in which he envisions a prehistoric America in constant contact with explorers and settlers from Europe and the Middle East who roamed as far West as Colorado.Īccording to Dr. Barry Fell, a former Harvard marine biology professor who studies ancient languages. West Virginia made a startling announcement, based upon the findings of Dr. That seemed the only likely explanation until the March, 1983 issue of Wonderful ![]() All across the sandstone face were hundreds of short vertical lines and symbols which looked like turkey feet.įor years, locals and scholars alike assumed the petroglyphs were written by Indians. I expected something similar to the hundreds of other petroglyphs throughout Appalachia, rough outlines of elk or bison, but what I found was bizarre, unlike anything I had ever seen before. The symbols were there, just like the brochure said they would be, carved deeply into the sandstone face. Whoever - teenagers, I supposed - had worn the path so well had left a lot of empty beer cans along the way. Instead, what I found was a well-worn dirt path leading to the overhang, which was a short distance up the mountain from a set of railroad tracks. Maybe some scholars would be there, I thought, studying its rough figures. I had expected to find a park, some validation that this settlement had what could be one of the world’s most important historical sights. Were Celtic explorers in the coalfields? I intended to find out, ever since I read an ambiguous reference to Celtic petroglyphs, rock carvings, in a Wyoming County brochure at an I-77 rest stop somewhere in Southern West Virginia. You never expect them to scream out that one of Western Hemisphere’s most important historical sights is nearby and all this time it has been right under your nose. ![]() You expect these little signs to have some cute anecdote about the first settler in the area or to say how old a nearby church is. Just south of Oceana, in Wyoming County, West Virginia, there is a little white historical marker that makes a bold claim: Celtic explorers had journeyed west from Ireland and were here, nearly a thousand years before Columbus, Cabot and DeSoto. ![]()
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