The imaging also showed two faint lines of text at the base of the stone, which read “Affliction sore with patience bore, Physicians w{h}ere in vain.”The university said this was a variant of a popular 18th Century verse often found on the tombstones of those who had died after long illness.It added that the inscription appeared to omit a “he” in the first line and included a stray “h” in “were,” which it said reflected challenges faced by craftsmen before modern text-editing tools.The team, the university said, also identified a third, partially visible inscription on a shield above the main text, which is currently under further analysis.Masséglia said: “Spending your day in a graveyard might sound a bit morbid, but really it’s about putting the people back into the landscape that we’re excavating. “The Reeves were a well-known local family who, we can see from the parish records, were living in Loddington from at least the early 1600s.”Last year, we deciphered the neighbouring stone to Henry’s, and now we realise that it was his mother’s. “She died 20 years after her son and was buried right next to him, their headstones so close that they are touching. “We wouldn’t have understood what we were looking at without RTI. We’re combining traditional fieldwork with digital techniques so we can recover voices that would otherwise remain lost.”
Students identify heavily eroded gravestone in Loddington
