Prehistoric rock art is usually associated with north Northumberland but some fine examples have been found much closer to home.

The Ryton Stone, now in the collection of the Great North Museum - Hancock (formerly Museum of Antiquities), Newcastle upon Tyne (Accession No: 1934.33) was recorded by the Northumberland & Durham Rock Art Project. Their illustration shows that another photo in the Gateshead Libraries collection (Ref. 09_05) is a reversed print of the the one shown above.

The description on England's Rock Art website - ERA-2040:

This new and beautiful example of Northumbrian rock-art has just turned up.

Sadly, at the moment, if I told you where it was found I would have to kill you, probably with a Neolithic hand-axe or an arrow tipped with an Early Bronze Age barbed and tanged arrowhead.

The panel, on the horizontal surface of natural sandstone bedrock has an array of cups with multiple rings, deep cups with more delicate, distorted rings, cups without rings, a dumb-bell, and a delightful and intriguing set of curving grooves which flow over the rock surface, connecting many of the motifs and uniting the overall design. It appears to have been made by an accomplished  prehistoric artist, made to fit with the natural cracks and cover the sections between. It is clearly a very good example of the 4000 year-old, Northumbrian rock-art tradition.

Art is certainly how it appears, but quite why these carvings were created we can now only speculate. See here for some of my thoughts.

Further study of this new panel and its locality will add to our knowledge of the important prehistoric rock art heritage of the area. It certainly brightened up my day.

LINKS

England's Rock Art - ERA

Another area of our local Green Belt proposed for housing development, along with that at Throckley (see blog below), is Birney Hill Farm south of Darras Hall. Here development firm, Lugano, have proposed building 280 properties despite strong local opposition.

A large cup-and-ring marked stone was found recently during building operations at Birney Hill and acquired by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne in early 2015. The building company whose workers uncovered the stone, Wardell Armstrong, transported it to a site near the south door of the Great North Museum (Hancock).

The sandstone rock, weighing nearly 3 tonnes, is decorated with distinctive cup and ring symbols that are a common feature of prehistoric rock art. Archaeologists think that it is unlikely that the rock was originally from that location as it is clearly a part of a much larger rock that had been recut. It is possible that it was brought to Birney Hill from another location and was then used as part of a building or some other structure.

LINKS

Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums Blog: Rock Art from Birney Hill

England's Rock Art (ERA)

Feeling in need of a prehistoric rock art fix, I travelled up to Edinburgh on Saturday 3rd May to attend the annual conference of the British Rock Art Group. There was a good balance between academic researchers and interested amateurs, with both represented in the talks program; conference fees were kept low and organiser, Tertia Barnett, and the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Edinbugh University made us all very welcome.

Andrew Jones of the University of Southampton gave the key note talk that opened the conference, Art before the rocks: rock art and the decorated artefacts of Neolithic Britain. He described elements of portable art in the Neolithic, including decorated mace heads, chalk plaques, carved stone balls and stone and antler mace heads. What seemed to be important was the act of making and decorating rather than the completed artefact itself. The decoration of chalk artefacts in particular seem to have been often reworked, the most spectacular example being the Folkton Drums from North Yorkshire, recently examined. What can such objects tell us about the carved rocks of the Neolithic? Is there evidence for these too being reworked? Was the act of carving the rocks more or just as important as the finished design?

Andrew Jones's recent work on the rock art of Kilmartin was published as ‘An Animate Landscape: rock art and the prehistory of Kilmartin Argyll, Scotland'. His wider review of the role of art in Neolithic Europe (edited with Andrew Cochrane of the British Museum) was published as ‘Visualising the Neolithic'.

The talks were split in four sections: Scottish Rock Art: Discovery and Rediscovery, Rock Art Recording, Conservation and Management, and two sections on World Rock Art: Research and Interpretation. The abstracts can be read here.

In addition there were a number of poster presentations, a hands-on workshop on rock carving by Andy McFetters, a demonstration of the Ughtasar Rock Art Project Picture Viewer, and recent changes made to England's Rock Art Database with addition of data from the CSI: Rombalds Moor project.

There were many highlights for me, and I don't have room to list them all.

Antonia Thomas told us about the 600 examples of incised, pecked, cup-marked and pick-dressed stone recovered from the excavations of the Orkney Ness of Brodgar excavation, many of which were found in situ within the buildings. Many of the markings found in the buildings were not located on visible surfaces. Again, was the act of making the markings more important than the markings themselves?

Trevor Cowie gave us an historical account of rock art finds in the south-east of Scotland, where they remain uncommon. Like Cumbria, are they scarse here because of the predominant geology?

George Currie told us of his recent discoveries in new regions of the Highlands. Some of these were some distance from existing known sites and may have been associated with ancient routes through the glens.

The description of a Neolithic incised stone found in the wall of a ruined blackhouse in Arisaig by Ken Bowker made me realise how often such stones may be overlooked. The Arisaig stone is only shallowly incised and the lines become invisible in anything but raking light.

In contrast, new rock art at Eldwick of a large boulder carved with around 60 cups and connecting grooves, found at the end of the Rombalds Moor project, had been surprisingly unrecognised. Louise Brown gave us a final update of the watershed project that culminated in this find by project volunteers.

In the round the world sessions, there were interesting talks by Tertia Barnett on rock art in the northern Sahara, and Richard Jennings on Saudia Arabia, evidence in both places of their very different prehistoric climate.

The two most captivating sites for me though were Aron Mazel's account of the amazing rock shelter paintings of the Didima Gorge in the Drakensberg mountains, and Tina Walkling's talk on of the carved boulders in the wonderful mountain landscape of Ughtasar in Armenia. Aminals, human and representation of hunting predominate in these contexts making me wonder why they don't feature in ours.

In the Didima Gorge, 3909 paintings occur at 17 rock shelters. Aron Mazel has proposed that the richness of the gorge’s rock art is associated with its acoustic properties making it a significant spiritual place for the San hunter-gatherers. The record made by Harald Pager in 1972 Ndedema : A Documentation of the Rock Paintings of the Ndedema Gorge illustrated by hand-coloured, black and white photographs looks like a book worth having. 

Cezary Mamirski brought us back to the British symbolic form with his description of the prehistoric cultures and rock art tradition of Sardinia.

The problems of conservation and management of British rock art was raised in several talks. Myra Giesen described a new staging system for rock art erosion and the correlation with exposure and soil salt content. A new open-source smartphone application called EpiCollect, introduced by Louise Felding, could make a good tool for ongoing recording and monitoring.

Recent damage to panels at Lordenshaw and graffiti on rocks as far apart as Ilkley Moor and Ughtasar show that human damage is not isolated.

Although sceduling did nothing to protect the Lordenshaw rock, it was good to hear that 17 new sites in Northumberland, including Ketley Crag rock shelter, Weetwood Moor, Lemington Wood, Amerside Law and Buttony, have been recently awarded Scheduled Ancient Monument status, a direct result of recording by volunteers on the Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Project (NADRAP). One element of sceduled status is both legal protection, and regular monitoring through the heritage at risk program.

Another site scheduled for protection by English Heritage is Goats Crag rock shelter, whose unique animal carvings seem to me not disimilar to some of those shown on boulders of Ughtasar. The prehistoric nature of these motifs has always been controversial, and some doubt that they were even made artificially. However, the stunning location and the mystery of the animal motifs intrigues me.

George Nash was unable to attend but his talk would have discussed the recent trend for defacing of contemporary graffiti by rival street artists. In contrast, reworking and adding to earlier art seemed to be the accepted norm in the prehistoric world.

Robert Wallis finished us off with a talk on the history of entanglement of shamanism and art that have led us to assumptions about the origins of prehistoric symbolism. Perhaps the hallucinogenic effects of magic mushrooms have nothing to do with cup and ring motifs at all. Artistic people I know seem able to use their imagination without recourse to an altered state. Prehistoric artists would have been no different.

A poster by Alan Calder of the Edinburgh Archaeology Field Society on the rock art of Tormain Hill provided an introduction to Sunday's field trip to rock art sites in the Edinburgh area. Another group headed south to Roughting Linn in Northumberland.

I have had a long interest now in Northumberland's prehistoric carved rocks and occasionally get about to visit rock art in more distant locations, including Durham, Yorkshire and even parts of Scotland.

A recent visit to La Palma in the Canary Islands gave me pause for more thought, both on how rock art might be, or should be conserved, interpreted for the public, and also on the apparent similarities and differences in rock carving traditions in these two very different locations.

This week I reached an understanding with prehistoric rock art.

Not, you understand, an understanding of prehistoric rock art, which would be a different thing entirely. My conversion has been sudden, and as much emotional as rational, probably more so. Let me try to explain.

I first discovered Northumberland's rich array of prehistoric rock carvings in the early 1990s when we came to live here from Edinburgh. I was interested in maps and the outdoors and was intrigued by a couple of thin paperback books obtained from the little bookshop in the old Museum of Antiquities under the arches of Newcastle University. The two volumes (one blue and one yellow) were by Stan Beckensall, published in 1991, entitled:  Prehistoric Rock Motifs of Northumberland: A Complete Guide. Finding the carved rocks from Stan's descriptions and maps became a passion and led me to some outstandingly beautiful places. Both the places and some of the carved rocks have since become good friends, worthy of repeat visits from time to time.

Apart from one possible example in north Northumberland, all the carved motifs in the county are symbolic rather than representational, of the type known as cup and ring. Most of the carvings are in situ, on outcrops and large boulders in the sandstone uplands, although some are on smaller rocks, even portable, and some associated with other archaeological monuments such as burial cairns, cist burials and standing stones. In Northumberland, and many of these other areas, the carved rocks are seldom on their own, usually in groups, and often large groups.

I soon found there were other people out there, mostly amateurs, interested in the carved rocks. There was a loose group of enthusiasts with a huge knowledge and understanding. Once a year in the spring there would be an informal Rock Art Meeting (RAM) held on a different site,  The driver for these was Jan Brouwer and a friend from the Netherlands. Jan ran the British Rock Art Blog and compiled a comprehensive website of rock art photographs, taken by himself and friends over the country. With this group I visited many sites in Northumberland, Durham, Galloway, Argyll, Perthshire and Yorkshire. All the rock art was similar; cup and ring motifs were common, but often with local variation or style.

Most of the existing photography seemed to concentrate on the carvings themselves, but for me both the carving and its location were important. The places held a magic that was enhanced by the mystery of the carved rocks. The group showed me the influence of light and water on the rock surfaces to improve my photography of the carvings, conditions often necessary to see them at all, if highly eroded.

Stan Beckensall was deservedly awarded an honorary PhD from the University of Newcastle in 2004. His archive was donated to the University and made available on a pioneering website in 2006, the work of Aron Mazel. Later, I was able to volunteer for the Northumberland & Durham Rock Art Project (N&DRAP), joining other volunteers, several who have become good friends. We spent 3 years building on this earlier work and developing a method of 3-dimesnional photographic reconstruction (photogrammetry) with the assistance of English Heritage. The result was the England's Rock Art website (ERA).

Recent years have shown much more interest in our prehistoric rock art heritage from the professional archaeology community and I have had the opportunity to read some of their work and go to occasional conferences. The carvings have been hard to date but some excavations of rock art sites put them in the Early Bronze Age and possibly even further back into the Neolithic. Further back of course, in the times of the hunter gatherer communities, when much of Britain was covered in ice, caves on the continent and in a few places in Britain were decorated with much more representational art. The Neolithic was a time of woodland clearance and early farming. These people carved cup and ring symbols on Northumberland rocks.

These people had the same intelligence and ability as we do today.. Modern genetics has shown that many of the inhabitants of these islands are indeed direct descendants of these earlier people. Emotion, superstition and cultural traditions probably paid much more importance in their lives but are still within us.

All the work has looked for correlation between the motifs and the locations to find a meaning and purpose for the art. We have examined their distribution, relationships to water, mineral deposits, the sea, track-ways, transhumance, existing monuments and domestic buildings. We have examined the orientation and slope of the rocks and inter-visibility of the sites. We have speculated on the numbers of rings, which way the grooves run, and on alignments and a whole lot of other things.

Where then has my new understanding come from this week?

Firstly, because of an injury to our booked speaker, I agreed to do an impromptu talk on rock art to this Local History Society meeting on Monday 10th September. After a bit of a break from rock art I had to go back through some of my old material, photos and books.

Secondly, by chance, there was a conference on rock art held as a surprise 80th birthday party for Stan Beckensall held in Queen's Hall Arts Centre in Hexham on Saturday 15 September.

Like turning the focus wheel of your binoculars, the mist of speculation and conflicting theories has suddenly lifted; in my mind at least.

Northumberland's cup and ring carvings are clustered in certain places. These places retain an emotional power which for me is a combination of location, views, wildlife, loneliness and their raw beauty. This is magnified by the history of what has gone before - the continuity of community.

Stan describes this in his book, Northumberland: The Power of Place (2001):
'Places generate feelings: some do this because we have learnt what happened there, some because they are physically striking or beautiful, and others because they have some indefinable attraction or quality.'

Jan Brouwer became ill and died at home in Holland in April 2011. The group of which he was an important part felt the need to provide a lasting memorial. What better than a rock-carved symbol, of importance both to our group and himself, in a location with equally powerful resonance. This we did in a small ceremony in Spring 2012.

So my hypothesis is this. Cup and ring carvings are just places of remembrance. The meaning of the symbol has been lost to us over the millennia. Like the Christian cross or fish, it probably held layers of meaning to the people who used it, something we can no longer grasp. Perhaps the places were actually cemeteries but we have little evidence that their dead were buried in the vicinity. Burial cairns from later people are often located nearby . Perhaps they were places where cremated ashes were scattered, or perhaps disposal of bodies went on elsewhere. Depending on belief, the body might not be necessary for the spirit to continue.

The powerful site with its carved rocks would become an important place in the community. It might be in a high place above where they normally lived. Places to think and remember, seek assistance from departed family members or just rest. It is unlikely death was hidden or unusual, it was probably an ever near part of the cycle of life. The places themselves may of course have been chosen because of prior importance, on route-ways, view points or with agricultural connections.

It's not a new theory and certainly not mine. As a hypothesis, can it be tested? What evidence do we need to prove it or disprove it? It seems to me to explain many things: the locations, the distribution, the local styles with their common elements, the fact that some are artistic and some crude or fragmentary.They could have been made by different individuals with different abilities, some maybe even by children.

Prehistoric rock art has been a very personal journey of discovery. I have tried here to exclude facts (it's getting easier these days)  and just follow a gut feeling.  Go and sit for a time in quiet refection on Chatton Park Hill, in Kettley Crag rock shelter, on the ridge at Old Bewick, at Routing Lynn, on Weetwood Moor, or in one of the many other magic places you know about, and see what you think. Bereavement makes for powerful emotions. Powerful symbols shared between living and dead carved as a lasting memorial, creating a place to visit, reflect and consult.

08 April 2014
National recognition for Northumberland ancient history.
(Archive Link)

10 April 2014
Protected status for Northumberland's prehistoric rock art carvings.
(Archive Link)