New Ross Herm Stone

About This Carved Stone

A medium-sized standing stone uncovered by Joan Harris in the 1970s while landscaping the grounds of a property she and her husband Ron had purchased outside New Ross, Nova Scotia, roughly 20 miles north of Oak Island. Harris named it the Herm Stone and identified a faint carved cross on its upper surface, which she presented as part of a larger claim that the site had successively been the location of a seven-towered Viking castle, a Scottish mansion with twelve marble pillars and a golden dome, and an outpost of the Knights Templar. Harris set out her interpretation of the property and its history in her self-published book A Castle in Nova Scotia.

The property was sold in 1990 to Alva and Rose Pye and later purchased by researcher and author Alessandra Nadudvari and her partner Tim Loncarich, who invited the Lagina team to visit in Season 4 Episode 1, aired 15 November 2016. Nadudvari directed Rick Lagina, Charles Barkhouse, and Doug Crowell to the Herm Stone and identified what she believed was a Templar cross carved on its surface. Rick Lagina examined the carving on camera and stated it appeared consistent with a Portuguese Templar cross of the type documented in 12th-century records. The stone was presented alongside the property's stone well, into which professional diver Tony Sampson would descend in the following episode, and the foundation walls Harris had originally uncovered, as part of the case for a pre-discovery Templar presence in the New Ross area.

The Templar reading of the New Ross property has been contested. Charles Lindsay of Parks Canada examined the site in the 1980s and concluded that nothing on the grounds predated the nineteenth century, and historian Brian Culbertson later pointed to an 1817 letter from Surveyor General Charles Morris of Nova Scotia recommending a site for the blacksmith shop of one Daniel McKay, together with an 1860 survey map showing a McKay allotment at the same location. Excavation has not addressed whether the foundation stones belong to McKay's works, to an earlier structure beneath them, or to both, and the Herm Stone itself has not been scientifically dated. Separately from the Templar question, New Ross carries pre-discovery significance through a second artifact: a 1671 Order of the Garter medallion recovered from the soil nearby. Author James McQuiston, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, argues in Oak Island Knights (2018) that the medallion belonged to Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle, who was the principal investor in Sir William Phips's 1687 salvage of the Spanish treasure ship Nuestra Señora de la Concepción. McQuiston, who presented his Knights Baronet theory on the show across Seasons 6, 7, and 9, proposes the medallion was given to Phips as an honorary knighthood token and later carried to New Ross, where Phips would have had reason to visit during his subsequent term as Governor of Nova Scotia from 1691 to 1695. The Herm Stone sits within a wider New Ross area in which other recovered material points to seventeenth-century activity, independent of the Templar claim.