These mysterious letters are carved on the Shepherd's Monument at the Shugborough estate in Staffordshire. Since every other crackpot in the world has weighed in with a theory about their meaning, here's my crackpot idea. The letters are not a code, but rather the initial letters of some quotation from literature. If I were so minded, I would start searching with the King James version of the Bible, although all those V's suggest Latin. Of course such a search would be more efficient with a computer program.