To appear in Appalachian Voice.
This has not been edited.

 by Dave Payne, Sr. 

	 Just south of Oceana, West Virginia, there is a little white historical marker that 

makes a  bold  claim- Celtic explorers were here, nearly a  thousand years before 

Columbus, Cabot and  DeSoto.

	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. You  never expect it 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.  

	Were Celtic explorers in the coalfields? I  intended to find out.  I had expected to 

find a park, some validation that this settlement had what would  be one of the world's most 

important historical  sights. Maybe some scholars would be there,  studying its rough figures. 

	 A well-worn path led a short distance up the mountain from to the overhang. 

Whoever had worn  the path so well had left a lot of empty beer cans along the way. 

Unbelievable apathy.  The symbols were there, just like the  brochure said they would be, 

carved deeply into the sandstone face.  

	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.  All across the sandstone face were hundreds of  short vertical lines 

and symbols which looked  like turkey feet. 

	 For years, locals and scholars alike assumed the petroglyphs were written by 

Indians. That seemed the only likely explanation until the March, 1983 issue of Wonderful 

West Virginia  made  a startling announcement, based upon the  findings of Dr. Barry Fell, a 

former Harvard marine biology professor who studies ancient languages.

	 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. According to Dr. Fell, the Wyoming and Boone County carvings tell the story of 

Christ's birth. It seemed pretty far fetched, but Fell said he could prove it.

	 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. He arranged to have observers there at dawn on December 22, 1982, the 

day of the winter solstice. 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. "That proves it," said 

one of the team members. That was good enough for me, too. 

 	I spent the next year learning as much as  I  could about Ogham and the petroglyphs. 

I'd even completed this an earlier version of this article, chopped full of all the evidence I  

could find supporting the claim. I tried to imagine why these people were here, how and 

where they lived. I poured over what information I'd gathered, but the only local evidence 

was the carvings themselves.  

	While looking over my field notebook entry  from the first day I visited the Wyoming 

County site, I noticed something different about a familiar passage. "The overhang doesn't 

provide much shelter from the elements now," I wrote, "however, a thousand years ago it 

probably did. Much of it (overhang) has fallen in, and it probably extended out another ten 

feet or so. Judging from erosion at the point of fracture, the collapse seems to be fairly 

recent, perhaps within the last couple of centuries."

	 At that time, the rock which forms the notch would have been a part of the 

overhang's roof. Even if the sun's rays could penetrate so deeply inside, there would have 

been no notch whatsoever to shine through. The verification of the sun shining through the 

notch made believers out of a lot of  people,  including me. 

	My confidence in the findings was shattered. I  began to question everything, 

especially the translation. Ogham is written by arranging marks along a constant horizontal 

axis. Consonants are written by marking a combination of vertical lines either above, below 

or perpendicular to the horizontal  line, called a stem line. Vowels are signified  by the 

number of dots on the stem line. 

	Neither the Wyoming or Boone County petroglyphs have any dots near any 

imaginable lines nor do the vertical lines, which would comprise the consonants, appear to 

be grouped consistently. Dr. Fell explains this by saying the writing is an early form of 

Ogham, Ogham Consaine, which like ancient Hebrew, is written without vowels. 

	Fell admitted History in The Rocks, a  television documentary about a similar  

petroglyph in Colorado, that, "we're guessing at the vowels." With ambiguous consonants 

and no vowels present one might be able decipher what he expects to find, whatever that 

may be. 

	For instance, at the end of some inscriptions, Fell sees the Ogham letter "L." He 

adds two vowels of  his own to the single consonant and gets "ele,"  the word for prayer.  I 

tried a little vowel guessing experiment in  English, by filling in vowels for the following  

"WSTVRGN."  "WSTVRGN," could be translated as "West  Virginia" or "Was it Vera 

again?" Scores of  other possibilities exist. Even if the consonants  were  clear, which they 

don't appear to be, dozens of  conflicting translations would be possible.  

	Once the translations were made, a lot of  gibberish was left over on both the Boone 

and Wyoming County petroglyphs, which didn't even closely resemble Ogham. Fell said he 

believed  it  to be a Scandinavian Bronze Age script called  Tifinag, which translates into a 

North African  Berber language, used by Norse seafarers, Fell  said.  

	Norse seafarers in Southern West Virginia?  There is evidence that Vikings were in 

North America around 1,000 A.D, three hundred years after Fell said the petroglyphs were 

written. There are accounts of  early settlers in New England found Indians wearing Viking 

coins of the period as jewelry and a Viking trading post at L' Anse Aux Meadows  was  

unearthed in Newfoundland in the early 1960s. 

 	But there is little reason to believe that  Norsemen or any other easterners would 

have ever ventured anywhere near southern West Virginia in  their travels. In Europe, 

Vikings seldom ventured far from their vessels and any inland travel was restricted to the 

farthest point up rivers they could sail from the sea. No such routes exist  into West Virginia 

from the Atlantic. 

 	The geography of the region would probably  have kept any Celts out as well. There 

is a reason Daniel Boone gained widespread fame for discovering the Cumberland Gap. The 

Appalachians form a nearly impenetrable barrier for travel.  Westward from the Atlantic,  

only a handful of passes exist along the entire length of the chain. Provided these explorers 

did venture on foot and did find one of the passes, they would likely have followed the 

course of a river, any conceivable route of which would have taken them far to the north or 

south of Boone and Wyoming Counties.

 	Let's say they did travel the only possible westward route into Southern West 

Virginia from the Atlantic, the James River, which flows from its headwaters along the West 

Virginia-Virginia border into the Chesapeake Bay. They would have to somehow cross the 

New River Canyon, which a mere two decades ago took an hour to cross by car and a 

thousand years ago, almost impassible by foot.

	 Had they skirted around it, they would have bypassed Wyoming and Boone 

Counties miles to the north.  Another scenario would be these people actually settled 

somewhere in West Virginia. The Adena  Moundbuilders would be at the height of their  

civilization, living in farming communities.  

	For  some reason, our Celtic settlers were driven away and moved up the Coal 

River to settle in Wyoming and Boone Counties. Had they remained in one place long 

enough to carve the petroglyphs and host the Norse visitors centuries later, they must have 

left evidence of their stay. They would have left tools, structures, weapons. 

	There should be some evidence of Indian words with Celtic roots. They might have 

brought with them diseases from Europe, yet there is no evidence of any possible plagues for 

another five or six hundred years, when the moundbuilders mysteriously vanish.

	 If these people had roamed the countryside as Fell says they did from the East 

Coast to Colorado, there would have been much contact with natives and a widespread 

exchange of germs. 

	No doubt they would have known how to make iron.  Their would be a constant 

need for it, to replace ploughshares, make swords, arrowheads and even armor. Yet, no 

evidence has been found of them excavating iron deposits or building smelting ovens. 

	They would have known how to cut stone.  Yet, no castles or quarries have been 

found. 

	 Regardless of their origin, these petroglyphs are spectacular. Who built them and 

why remains a mystery. There are still no good answers. There are countless tales and sagas 

of Europeans traveling across the Atlantic. 

	Viking sagas speak of contact with North America, which later were proven true. 

Admittedly, it is hard to believe that out of a world full of brilliant sailors no one besides the 

Vikings ever was made the journey to the West or was blown off course and landed in 

North America. But that doesn't verify that these West Virginia petroglyphs were created by 

Celts. Hard proof is needed, and it is lacking.