Heysham hogback

The Heysham hogback is an early medieval sculpted stone discovered around the beginning of the 19th century in the churchyard of St Peter's Church, Heysham, on the Lancashire coast, and now kept for protection inside the church. It is one of seventeen known early medieval stones in Heysham, a concatenation which once caused this site to be called "one of the most interesting in the country from the archaeological point of view". It is a product of the 10th-century Norse culture of the British Isles of which the precise purpose is not certainly known, though it may be a grave-marker. The carvings on the stone have been the subject of much dispute, different scholars interpreting them as showing a hunting scene, the patriarch Adam, the Norse hero Sigurd, the end of the world in Norse myth, or as being intended to blend both Christian and pagan themes. It has been called "perhaps the best example of its kind in the country".