balfarg A bit political, Urban standing stones, Urbanisation

Barn Storm

It is not often I get angry, but a recent encounter with a standing stone has really annoyed – and shocked me. I am pretty used to prehistory being badly treated, and indeed a whole chapter of my forthcoming book (have I mentioned this before?) deals with 20th and 21st century biographies of megaliths that have been treated shoddily. Many of these bounce back however, or take on a new life for a new audience, and most are still valued by a variety of different people and communities.

And then there is the Bogleys Stone of Fife.

Visualistion of the urban Bogleys Stone (artist unknown)

I came across the story of this standing stone by chance, as I was looking for a megalith to visit on a trip to Fife. Soon I encountered a visualisation of a standing stone set into what looked like cobbles situated in some kind of park. This (admittedly) crap vision for this standing stone came from a proposal for a future housing estate. But how on earth had a standing stone become part of this vision?

The Bogley’s Stone (Trove page) was / is a 2.7m long sandstone monolith that up until a quarter of a century ago had stood in relative peace for millennia in rural Fife just north of Kirkcaldy. I say relative peace because it was documented in the 1865 OS Name Book that rather strangely it was ‘was lifted and replaced a few years ago, but nothing was found’. In and out, just like that, and no treasure to be found.

(c) HES (date unknown, Brian Malaws collection)

The status quo remained and in 1960 an OS fieldworker reported that the ‘stone is in an excellent state of preservation’. This would not remain the case. In the late 1990s, a proposal was tabled to create an open cast coal mine in the vicinity of the standing stone, and it was quickly realised that this wonderful old sandstone sentinel was in the way. A proposal was cooked up by the opencast coal people. The stone would be removed, and a full excavation carried out. The stone would then be carefully placed in storage. The stone would then be ready for inclusion in a large housing estate that would be built at some point in the future as part of the reconsolidation of the land once it had been hollowed out of coal and filled back in again. This became a condition of planning permission being granted, a fact worth bearing in mind as our story unwinds.

In theory, this sounds OK. Archaeological information would be gained by a full excavation that might otherwise not have happened. The stone could be studied at leisure including investigation of a putative cupmark towards its top. And then a new community would benefit from having a standing stone in their midst, an educational resource and source of community pride. Megalithic place-making. Perhaps they might even name a street after the stone, even a school. I am comfortable with these sorts of pragmatic accommodations, even if it does seen rather drastic (and fanciful) in hindsight.

But the reality has been much, much darker.

Things started well. The page for the stone on the website The Modern Antiquarian documents as much, with the stone initially looking rather lost as the opencast encroached.

Photo taken by Nobut on 22nd August 2004

The stone was removed from its socket in September 2004 and the hole and surrounded area subject to excavation.

Photo by BigSweetie, dated 10th September 2004

The excavation was hugely valuable, carried out by AOC Archaeology and funded by the opencast mining company, by then called GM Mining Ltd. Results were reported on quickly, in the pages of the Tayside and Fife Archaeological Journal volume 13 (2007), written by John Lewis and John Terry, something of a dream team back in the day.

The excavation was able to show that the socket for the standing stone was almost 1m deep, cut into bedrock, and 0.7m across. Nothing of note was recorded from the hole (already looked into in the 19th C) as it was emptied of its precious megalithic filling, but evaluation trenches radiating out from the stone hole identified four small pits that each held cremated human bone. A fifth cremation deposit was found near the stone, suggesting that at least five people were associated with this stone in death. No artefacts that were prehistoric were found. But radiocarbon dates confirmed the excavation results: this was an early Bronze Age place. Job done.

But then things started to go amiss. At the time, it was believed that the stone would be in storage for only three years (Fife Today (29 October 2004)), but field notes in The Modern Antiquarian told a different story. A tale of delays and no news. User Trajan contacted Fife Council Archaeologist Douglas Spiers in 2008 and got this update (and this is worth quoting in full):

“The excavation process involved the complete removal of the stone. It was lifted and has been stored on pallets within a secure area within the development site since its excavation. However, as GM Mining is now in the final phases of site restoration and is due to leave the site for good in the next few months, the Council’s Archaeological Unit is in the process of arranging to have the stone uplifted and removed to for safe storage at the Council’s Roads Depot in Thornton. Moves are afoot to ensure that the redevelopment of the Kingslaw site is accompanied by planning conditions that will ensure that the stone is re-erected as close to its original position as is practicable. However, as the master plan for the site is not yet complete, it is not currently possible to say exactly where the stone will be re-erected and how it will relate to the new built environment around it. But it will be sensitively re-erected in a setting that will enable easy public access and interpretation” (source)

But still, nothing happened. GM Mining Ltd went bust in 2016. But construction work did begin on a large housing estate, part of the ‘New Kingdom Park’ development, currently focused to the south of where the standing stone had once stood. Kingslaw Gait is based on masterplans published in 2012.

JM Architects Master Plan for Kingslaw Gait (the standing stone stood roughly where a small roundabout is located near the centre of the image) (source)

But what of the standing stone, presumably still in storage, patient as a rock?

The local press reported in 2020 that finally, 16 years after the stone had been removed, it was on the comeback trail. Jon Brady of Fife Today reported excitedly that: The return of a 4,000 year-old standing stone to its rightful place in Fife has been assured after planners signed off on detailed proposals for its reinstatement.

Planning permission had recently been submitted to the Council by Murray Estates for Phase 3 of this massive post-mining development, and this included a pledge that the standing stone would be “sensitively re-erected in a setting that will enable easy public access and include interpretation of the history of the stone”. Accompanied by the dismal and unimaginative visualisation that started this blog post.

Armed with this information, I could have been mistaken for thinking that by spring of 2026 (a full 22 years after the stone was removed, and 19 years after it was supposed to be re-erected) my trip to Fife would be a classic urban prehistory tale – megalith meets urbanisation and magic happens. But it quickly became clear that the stone had still not made a re-appearance into the social world.

I contacted Douglas Speirs and asked him (a) where the stone was currently stored, and (b) could I at least visit the stone in storage, a sort of hospital visit for an ailing friend I had yet to meet. I had assumed there would be some sensitivities around this due to the prolonged delays involved. But, he gave me directions to the current location of the stone to my surprise and suggested there would be no problem accessing it as security was non-existent. For the sake of the ongoing security of the stone, I am not going to reveal where the stone currently lies, but suffice to say that it is not in ‘safe storage at the Council’s Roads Depot in Thornton’.

And so I headed off to Fife with my old friend former archaeologist Sam McKeand and his son Leo, to find the megalith. I was not prepared for what I was about to find.

We parked up and walked for about half an hour to get to the barn in which the stone now sits. Approaching the barn, it was clear that this was an abandoned building, and fallen Harris fencing sprawled around the perimeter of the small cluster of buildings, offering no resistance to visitors. We had a real sense of foreboding as we ventured towards the central barn, a structure whose roof was collapsing in part due to bricks that had been tossed up there. An asbestos warning added to the grim tableaux.

We continued round to the front of the barn, where doors had long since ceased to exist, adorned with a stopped clock. We found the standing stone almost immediately, not hidden towards the back of the barn and covered for protection from the elements as one might reasonably expected to find, but right at the entrance, balancing on two fence posts. The following images should really be preceded by a trigger warning if you are in any way inclined to believe that our heritage actually matters. Photos by Sam and I.

I need not labour the point. The stone was daubed with painted graffiti, and rocks and broken glass were strewn on its surface; people sit on this stone drinking. Bottles had been broken against this megalithic park bench too I suspect. Worst of all was clearly very recently carved initials on the stone, brutal incisions that cut deep. These terrible tattoos may well scar this stone forever.

We left the barn shaken. On my return to work, I immediately reported the damage and the state of the stone to Fife Council. I was sent a photo showing the stone on the last official visit that had been made here, date unknown. Something had dramatically changed for the worse in the years since this photo was taken…..

Photo courtesy of Douglas Speirs

Douglas Spiers pledged to investigate and look into this, and this blog post is not intended to find fault in the work of the small Fife Archaeological Unit and his colleagues. They are poorly resourced and at the whims of obscure rules about ownership, the planning condition that the stone be re-erected in the housing estate, and health and safety no doubt as well. And of course be that plans to erect the stone remain in place, ‘delayed for reasons outwith everyone’s control’.

But something has gone horribly wrong here. A precious and unique part of Bronze Age heritage – that belongs to us all, not a defunct mining company or tokenistic housing developers – is being trashed potentially beyond repair. How can this stone ever be erected again without serious and very expensive remedial work being carried out? And what has happened to this standing stone since I reported this to the authorities over 2 months ago? I dread to think. It is very upsetting. This stone was a focus for five burials for goodness sake.

Urban prehistory is often – but not always – about good news. Or at least compromises that have decent outcomes. Prehistoric sites and monuments are often changed when they are swept up in the arms of urbanisation, but there is an underlying sense of resilience that means that this change is modest or understandable. Standing stones might be moved, or repaired with concrete, or have some modern marks added to them. The enate prehistoriness of such places usually offers some kind of protective veneer. That is why they are rarely so horribly disrespected as the Bogleys Stone.

Disrespected by the planning system.

Disrespected by whoever put the stone in that barn and left it to rot.

Disrespected by those who frequent the barn who probably don’t know this is a 4,000 year old megalith.

Disrespected by whoever could not even be bothered to keep the stone out of the wind and the rain.

Disrespecting the dead.

Disrespecting the living who deserve this standing stone to be, at the very least, cared for when out of sight.

What would happen, I wonder, if I were to arrange for the stone to be moved from its current location to a safe place? Who would this anger? Who thinks they own this stone? Would this become my heritage crime?

One things is for sure – a heritage crime is being committed here and it stinks.

This should cause a barn storm of anger. But perhaps we are all too busy with our existential environmental and political crises to give bandwidth to what might be called a Bronze Age problem. When push comes to shove, what do we really value? And who cares?

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to Sam and Leo for coming on the visit to the stone and helping me document what we found. The Modern Antiquarian website was invaluable, thanks to those who left photos and fieldnotes (named above). Thanks also to Douglas Speirs for providing information about the stone’s location and for taking this up with the authorities. I will be very happy to update this post when I get news of any kind.

balfarg A bit political, Material culture, Rock-art, Weird

Lush prehistory

In the name of relaxation, would you like a small cup-and-ring marked stone to be gently rubbed back and forth against your jowls like this gentleman?

Image (c) Lush (source)

Now you can thanks to strong smelling toiletry-mungers Lush.

Because at many of their branches you can get the Highland Spa experience.

Who could walk past the enticing display in their shop windows? An alluring mixture of astroturf, some cardboard boxes, scrunched up grey paper and small stones with esoteric carvings on them. Catnip for the urban prehistorian.

What is that I see? Cup-and-ring marks. Spirals. What might be a wheel of cheese and a green bag o stuff.

Barely able to contain excitement, one begins to search online to find the secret of these stones, as going into the Lush shop itself would be too odorific.

The small pebbles are a key part of what Lush are calling a Scotland-themed spa treatment

What do you get for your £150? (??!?)

An hour long “full body hot stone massage” that features “Highlands spring water, stones carved with ancient Scottish symbols and … choreographed to a soundtrack of Gaelic historical folk songs re-recorded especially for the treatment.”

(c) Lush

So the cup-and-ring marked symbol stones are ‘ancient Scottish symbols’ which is not quite right, but this is a spa experience, not the National Museum of Scotland.

What part do these little pebbles play in the spa process? “The experience begins with a Scottish stone consultation using 250 million year old Scottish marble, carved with ancient symbols which correspond to various different states of mind. Choose ’the river’ to ebb and flow with life’s twists and turns, ‘simplicity’ to help focus on what matters, or ‘the rainbow’ to embrace hope and joy.”

A Scottish stone consultation.

I am not sure what meaning is ascribed to the prehistoric symbols on these stones, but I suppose it is no less unlikely than any of the other 108 theories that have been used to explain cup-and-ring marks according to Ronald Morris. Online I have found reference to symbols that mean ‘The Eye, The Village, and The Journey’ (source), The Rainbow (source) or ‘Community’ (source).

After this, you are likely to be asked to disrobe (‘Modesty Level 3’) and then have hot basalt stones laid on your back, which sounds to me the very opposite of relaxing. Gaelic music drowns out the screams of pain.

To finish: “The treatment ends with a warming Scottish tea infused with heather, leaving the client feeling comforted and relaxed.”

There is something weirdly occult about the ways that these prehistoric symbols are used in this rite, sorry, treatment. This is a “Unique stone consultation, inspired by tarot readings to reconnect and restore inner wellbeing” (source). Which sort of fits in with one strand of New Age practice where prehistoric and ‘Celtic’ and Gaelic stuff are entangled and millennia squashed together. Prehistory and linguistics set in stone. One reviewer noted that the experience ‘Spiritually Connected Me to My Celtic Roots’ and there is a general sense that the symbols stone selection process is one that has a spiritual, even religious dimension.

Symbols stones in the Glasgow Spa (c) Ellis Tuesday (source)

What does this spa treatment, its marketing, and the use of prehistoric symbols tell us? The generic ‘Highlandness’ of these symbols is wrongheaded of course, with similar motifs found across much of western Britain and not restricted to uplands never mind high lands. Gordon Barclay has convincingly argued that early conceptions of the Scottish Neolithic (from whence some of these symbols came) was very much assumed to be Highland in character, so it could be argued that the pitching of this hot spa experience is merely repeating a tired old trope about ‘ancient’ (and historic) Scotland.

Prehistoric and even Pictish symbols at the Oxford Street Lush (c) Pop Sugar (source)

But then where is the harm? This seems to be a pleasurable experience for those who like to do this kind of thing, and as noted already, if a cup-and-ring marked symbol is regarded as meaning, say, community, then that might not be too far from the prehistoric reality. But the curmudgeon in me would like users to be imparted with at least some contextual information about the origins of this type of symbol, extracting it from an esoteric Highland wooliness that leaves me uncomfortable.

Now, if they were not stones, but made of chocolate, I might have been more understanding….

Acknowledgements: thanks to Eddie Stewart for spotting the Glasgow Lush display, shown in the photos above not attributed to Lush.

See Barclay, G. 2004. ‘ “Four Nations Prehistory”: Cores and Archetypes in the Writing of Prehistory’. In Brocklehurst, H. and R. Phillips, eds. History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain, 151–159. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

balfarg Prehistoric Glasgow, Urbanisation

Close to home

I grew up in a town called Larkhall in South Lanarkshire, not far from Glasgow. It would be fair to say that this is a place that has a negative reputation at least in west central Scotland, and I was very aware of this when I was growing up. However the character of the town has changed quite a lot since my school days ended there in 1991, with a good deal of suburban expansion around the edges, catalysed I would imagine by the re-opening of the railway line, and two stations, in the town in 2005. There is now a thriving main street with lots of independent shops, which stands in contrast with the miserable centre of larger neighbouring town Hamilton.

Anyway, you do not read this blog to find out about the recent history of Lanarkshire towns. The reason that I am focusing on Larkhall here is because over the past decade or so development near the town centre has revealed a good deal of prehistoric traces that suggest at the very least low levels of settlement from the early Mesolithic through to the Iron Age. These discoveries, while not really being widely known locally, were made during a a series of evaluations and excavations in advance of several key developments: the construction of a new secondary school (Larkhall Academy) and two retail developments with associated car parks: Asda and Home Bargains / Iceland. Such development-led archaeology is a machine for finding urban prehistory in unexpected – but yet totally predictable – places.

Over the past couple of years I have given three talks in Larkhall about the town’s low key prehistory, two in St Machan’s Church, and one (in a very cold town centre venue) to the Larkhall Heritage Group. These brought me back to my roots, and even although I visit my parents regularly in the town, this deep time dive took on something of the character of an investigation into my own prehistory. I reflected on my own engagements with the places that prehistoric stuff would be found in the future when I was a school kid who did not even for a moment imagine that I would end up becoming an archaeologist. This has placed me in a complex temporal entanglement with this place, these places.

Larkhall postcard from around 1960 (c) Francis Frith Collection

A football pitch that I once played on (and it was literally once as I was never picked again) in a place that was once a Neolithic pit cluster site. Paths I used to haunt heading down to the viaduct (the highest in Scotland when in use) or Millheugh, cutting across roundhouse and ditch locations that no-one knew were there. Emergent prehistory only after the event. Future prehistory. The past in the present. As archaeologist Laurent Olivier has written, “the physical environment of the present is essentially made up of the things of the past” (2004, 205) although this was unappreciated by my 13-year-old self.

Various Larkhall viaduct views during a lockdown walk in 2020

I recently completed the manuscript for a book called Urban Deep Time: the Contemporary Archaeology of Prehistory (Bloomsbury, 2026) and as part of my word-cutting final edit, I removed a personal case-study of Larkhall from the final chapter. The rest of this post is an adapted version of this text.

Before Larkhall

As a schoolchild in the 1980s I attended Larkhall Academy, a secondary school in a small post-industrial, post-weaving South Lanarkshire. The school at that time (it has since been replaced by a new campus) consisted of two ugly bricks of black panels and windows and assorted ‘temporary’ ancillary structures.

The old / second Larkhall Academy (G Laird, Creative Commons)

As a relatively solitary teenager (see photo below for evidence of this), I often sought solace in the music department, but from time to time was convinced by sadistic PE teachers to partake in physical sports such as cross-country running in the rough moorlands surrounding the school on the fringes of the town and school campus. Walking back and forth to school, I passed between a leisure centre and playing fields, and every day I passed through a castle gateway folly with fake gun loops.

Robert Smellie gate, framing location of a Neolithic pit cluster, during a lockdown walk in 2020

My personal geography as a 15-year-old was fairly restricted spatially, and even more so in terms of time-depth. It is probably not fair to blame me at the time for giving no thought to what might lie beneath my feet as I trudged or wheezed across the barren landscape of my teenage huff, all sickly grass and tarmac.

Teenage me

In other words, exactly the kind of place where one would not expect there to have been a prehistoric legacy, a standard central belt town in Scotland. Yet over the past two decades, this perception has had to change – because of development. The landscape of my school experiences is now transformed, with the new school, retail parks, a network of tarmac footpaths, and housing developments. Together these represent a series of transactional non-places that could be anywhere in Britain, but what was found when these developments were being planned and prepared makes this place special. My horizons now expanded, revisiting my walks to and from school is now an exercise in unpeeling layers in time and memory.

Pre-school

This was first brought home to me when I found out about the discovery and excavation of a Neolithic pit cluster, probably a settlement site, in advance of the construction of the new Larkhall Academy in 2005/2006.

Larkhall Academy trench in 2006 – note old school in background (Headland Archaeology)

Located to the east of the old school, the footprint of the new school building spanned grass that I frequently walked across, and that football pitch I once played on. Evaluation undertaken by Headland Archaeology in 2005 found a ditch and pits, some of which contained prehistoric pottery. The following summer an open area excavation took place, revealing the full extent of this site, and recovering a wonderful assemblage of early Neolithic Carinated Bowl pottery. The excavators argued this cluster of nine postholes and eight pits were indicative of Neolithic settlement in the vicinity, albeit none of the features were part of a structure, However, a single piece of daub hinted at some form of wall or windbreak, and the remains of hearth sweepings were found in one pit.

New Larkhall Academy, Neolithic site partly under the school (my photo, 2016)
Neolithic carinated bowl sherds from the Larkhall Academy site (NMS / Alison Sheridan)

This bog-standard development-led discovery was for me magical, because of my own personal connection to this place. Here, twenty years after I first walked over this strip of land on the way to my new secondary school, archaeologists carefully recovered an incredible ceramic assemblage. Well over 100 sherds of Carinated Bowl were found, with an exceptionally thin fabric (indicating great skill on the part of whoever made them, as at-the-time National Museum of Scotland curator Alison Sheridan told me) with hints of plant and grain impressions on the expressive abraded surfaces. Moreover, the initial observation that hazelnuts had been consumed here was augmented by post-excavation analysis which showed evidence for the farming of oats and barley here, but not wheat, typical of many fourth millennium sites in Scotland (see Bishop et al. 2010, 77). All this half a metre beneath where my feet, where I walked, unaware of the thin temporal ice I was skating on.  This discovery was matched by a collection of cut features and a stone-lined hearth found during excavations nearby in 2011-2012 by CFA Archaeology Ltd. in advance of the construction of an Asda supermarket. Some of these features also contained sherds of Carinated Bowl pottery suggesting several phases of activity – and probably settlement – here in the fourth millennium BCE.

Selection of photos of features from the Asda site (Mitchell 2012, CFA Archaeology Ltd.)

Where hunters gathered

Taking the story of this place back to over five millennia ago would have blown the mind of me, the teenager, but still earlier traces remain in the place we now call Larkhall. The 2005 evaluation of the Larkhall Academy site recovered a small assemblage of Mesolithic lithics. The broader settlement context of this was identified a few years later when evaluation and excavation took place a few hundred metres away in advance of the construction of small retail park consisting of a Home Bargains, Iceland, and associated car park. Located on a promontory, this site – known as Nairn Street – was excavated in 2014 and 2015 by GUARD Archaeology Ltd.

A wide range of cut features were found, including four structures, three of which belonged to later prehistory. But one of them was Mesolithic, Structure 1, which consisted of a 5m diameter arc-shaped setting of seven postholes, and other postholes may have belonged to the other side of this small timber building.

GUARD excavations of a Mesolithic structure at Nairn Street, Larkhall
Structure 1 features, plan and sections (from Mooney 2023, GUARD Archaeology Ltd.)

The postholes produced evidence for burning in the vicinity, perhaps in hearths, and one radiocarbon date, from a fragment of alder, was produced, dated to 8203–7793 cal BC (SUERC-62280). There was not much else to hint at what this ancient place was used for, and a lack of the lithics one would normally associate with such a site, but it likely “reflected temporary or transient habitation in early prehistory” (Mooney 2023, 10). This place, where hunters gathered amidst mixed woodland some 10,000 years ago, is now a car park.

Home Bargains homes

The presence of Mesolithic and Neolithic features and material culture found in advance of the construction of car parks, a school and a supermarket, should not be taken as evidence of continual occupation of this place. Rather, it probably represents the normal churn of earlier prehistoric settlement patterns, largely mobile, and so we should imagine that there were periods of many centuries where no-one was living here, and the hollowed-out traces of what went before got lost in the long grass. Things changed somewhat later in prehistory, as evidenced by the other three structures found at the Home Bargains / Iceland retail park, all dating to many thousands of years later but suggesting less transient settlement rhythms.

Structure 3, of which the Nairn Street excavation report notes would have been, “typical of roundhouses constructed and used during the middle Bronze Age in the region” (Mooney 2023, 39), might be described in other ways, given that is merely a clinical archaeological explanation and name for what were once homes. This roundhouse was built and in use in the middle of the second millennium BC. This was indeed a place to live, with evidence found for cereal processing, food storage and the working of shale objects. Structural problems were adjusted with home improvements, a nice connection to the homeware shop now built a few metres from where it once stood. At the end of its life, this house burnt down, perhaps accidentally.

Note Larkhall Academy and Asda car parks in background (source: Mooney 2023)

And so it continues, with hints at Iron Age activity across all of these sites, including ceramics found at Larkhall Academy and a wooden structure that was constructed on the remnants of structure 3, partially destroying its remains. This latter building, dating to the centuries around the year 0, contained evidence for large deposits of dung and may have been a byre or shepherd’s hut. Layers upon layers, jumbles of human stories and lives, reworked again and again. Campsite, workplace, home, field, shieling hut, car park, school, shop. This is not a continuous thread, but there is a suggestion that some inhabitants of this place uncovered something left from before, a keepsake, a curio, an archaeological artefact.

So what?

A question I get asked surprisingly commonly in my archaeological endeavours is ‘so what?’. The taxpayer and several developers had to pay good money to get these archaeological features and finds investigated in order for their building projects to commence. And to be honest, as things stand, all that money has achieved is some nice boxes of stuff in museums and some dry excavation reports that can be downloaded.

There is a very nice conglomeration of evidence here that indicated human domestic everyday life for a period of several thousand years, on and off, long before Larkhall. Yet as far as I can tell, these discoveries have so far had little impact on the community. If the reception of the talks I have done is anything to go by, awareness of these discoveries is very low in the town. I spoke to teachers at my old school during a visit to a careers event in 2016 about the Neolithic pit cluster and – even though part of the new school building now sits in a location that was once where early farmers lived – they knew nothing about this. A chance has been missed here.

As the Iron Age house was being built, ancient potsherds and charcoal were almost certainly found and probably handled and passed around; have we lost this kind of intimate connection with the past of the places that we live? Or can urban prehistory and serendipity of development-led archaeology give us hope?

This was after all a place that was “popular in prehistory”. This is close to home for me, and I need to do more.

Sources and acknowledgements: pulling together the information for the various evaluations and excavations above meant consulting a series of data structure reports, interim reports, Discovery and Excavation entries and some other bits and pieces. I have tried to keep the referencing as light touch as possible. These are the sources used for each site and – where possible – a link. See also the Trove link for each site in the text.

Larkhall Academy pit cluster (Trove ID 283916): Dutton, A and Atkinson, D 2006 Larkhall Academy South Lanarkshire, Unpublished Excavation Data Structure Report. Headland Archaeology Ltd.

Asda car park site (Trove ID 320593): Mitchell, S 2012 Land at Larkhall Academy, Larkhall, South Lanarkshire Archaeological Mitigation (Data Structure Report No. 2011), CFA Archaeology Ltd. See here

Home Bargains / Iceland site (Trove ID 348575): Mooney, K 2023 A Mesolithic camp, Bronze Age roundhouse and an Iron Age building at Nairn Street, Larkhall, South Lanarkshire. ARO53: GUARD Archaeology Ltd., available online here.

See also Rosie Bishop et al. 2010 Cereals, fruits and nuts in the Scottish Neolithic, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 139, 47-103. https://doi.org/10.9750/PSAS.139.47.103

 

balfarg Modern monuments, Prehistoric Glasgow, Replicas and reconstructions, Weird

Blood incantation

The most (in)famous example of heavy metal and prehistory harmonising is surely the undersized Stone’enge that is slowly lowered into the midst of guitars and spandex in the 1984 mock-rock-doc This is Spinal Tap. Confusion over inches and feet is an appropriate mistake to make for a monument that has so often in the past been boiled down to measurements and azimuths. If this incident had really happened, then you can imagine the merch potential English Heritage would have squeezed out of mini-trilithons. (Actually, they have beat me to it with a Stonehenge Trilithon cushion.)

There is a fascinating post in Nancy Wisser’s blog Clonehenge where she explores some of the versions of this little grey trilithon that have appeared in various Spinal Tap live gigs since the first film, not all of which are true to the truly tiny original. In fact the size of Stone’enge has varied as much as Derek Smalls’ cod piece. One version that appeared at Glastonbury was “closer to 4 feet than 18 inches high”. Elsewhere Nancy notes that, “at least one real band did use a Stonehenge replica as a set back in the heyday of boomer rock, one so large that it didn’t fit into some venues. Which band? We’ve seen two or three mentioned but we’re told it was really Black Sabbath…”.

This has rather messily spread into the very much belated sequel Spinal Tap II: the end continues (2025) to the extent that a new version of the song has been recorded featuring Elton John himself, and the trilithons seem to have become part of the Tap brand. Fitting as both are national treasures that have been flogged to death.

Squeezing all of the juice out of this joke, the film also includes the band visiting an actual mini version of Stonehenge, and finally commissioning a proper one which they narrowly missed dropping on Sir Elton’s zombie hair.

The Guardian (they give the source as ‘youtube’)

Plus they recorded concert footage at Stonehenge, presumably vibrating the heck out of the concrete that holds together half of the original version of the monument. “’How fitting is it that this actual-probable-send-off is shot, historically, at Stonehenge, the mysterious landmark that we now know must have been erected thousands of years ago purely to serve as the setting for the last act of Spinal Tap,’ said Kent Sanderson, CEO of Bleecker Street, the company that’s distributing the concert” as reported in Rolling Stone magazine in October 2025. That’s as good a Stonehenge theory as any I’ve read to be honest.

Rock and Stonehenge have actually had a long relationship, as the late Tim Darvill noted on more than one occasion, notably in book chapters (go and have a look). More broadly, megaliths like standing stones and dolmen (real and imagined) have adorned album covers, t-shirts and inspired song titles and album themes. The double meaning of the word rock here barely needs to be mentioned. In fact I am embarrassed that I have done so.

So imagine my pleasure when I witnessed first hand in Glasgow recently some megalithic thrash metal action.

The venue? The Garage. The band? Blood Incantation. In their own words (or their webmaster’s) they are a Cosmic Death Metal Band formed in 2011 and are from Denver, Colorado. This was their first gig in Scotland, touring the 2024 album Absolute Elsewhere.

Blood Incantation (source: grimmgent.com)

After moving into the ideal viewing location towards the middle and back of the venue (close to bar, not near toilet queue, equidistant between speakers), it became apparent that at either side of the stage were a pair of what appeared to be stone columns, with weird symbols carved into them. These had an eldritch, Lovecraftian quality. When lights were dimmed (most of the time to be fair) the symbols ominously glowed red.

In an interlude between two (very long) tracks, the lead singer asked a bemused audience, ‘has anyone ever seen a dolmen’? My excitable shouted affirmative answer was lost in the cheers, jeers and beers. Then they got back down to serious prog business again. Bodies began to surf in front of my eyes, hair and heads flapping back and forth like hairy heads connected to a typewriter. The number of the beast was writ large around me essayed in hand gestures.

At the end of the gig, we made our way against the flow of the crowd towards the front of the stage. I wanted to have a closer look at the ‘megaliths’ although this was somewhat thwarted by a fence across the front of the stage area and some security roadie types. I was able however to see some weirder anthropomorphic symbols that were are the bases of the column, out of my view during the gig. It was a glorious mish-mash of occult and weird, and very likely none of it made any sense whatsover, but it looked the part.

It was also much clearer that there was a lot of writing on more than one side and panel of the columns, some of which had an ancient Mesopotamia vibe. Whether this actually says anything or not who knows, but it represented a surprising amount of detail. Google translate has been no help. It was probably 3d printed and portentous in a confusing way.

I leaned over and asked one of the roadies what they were made of. Polystyrene he confirmed with the booming voice of someone who spends far too much time standing near speakers. Hardly a surprise given that even the fanciest tour bus would surely have struggled to store and move these monoliths had they been made of stone. They did look bloody heavy though and even as I wandered off, had not been unplugged, casting a sickly red glow onto the back of my hands.

I suppose this is a lesson for me: that there can be night off for the urban prehistorian. I cannot relax for a minute. Because allusions to prehistory, however wrong or stupid or surprising or baffling, seem to be everywhere. Maybe I am just tuned into this stuff now, and nobody else would even have noticed or cared. But I notice. And I care. So you don’t have to.

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to Andrew Baines for taking me to see Blood Incantation. They were jolly good.

balfarg Modern monuments, Rock-art, Weird

Passage grave art … in a passage

Urban prehistory can still surprise me. On a recent trip to Belfast, I hoped that I might stumble upon something that would be blog post worthy, and I thought I had hit urban prehistory gold when I got off the train at the nearby city of Bangor and saw a standing stone in the station concourse.

It turns out that this megalith was erected for the millennium with a time capsule encased within it. This was set in place in 2000, and a plaque on the grey stone reads:

North Down Burgh Council Time Capsule Sealed in 2000 by Mayor Alan Chambers to be opened in 2100

I assume that the time capsule is the weird metal thing embedded into the stone beneath the plaque, unless it is just a fancy shelf.

This resulted in some nice social media interactions, but not much else.

And then came Pottinger’s Entry in Belfast.

On a walk in the city centre with Jan and archaeologist Rebecca Younger, we completely by chance came across a stunning tiled mural on Pottinger’s Entry with a distinctively prehistoric flavour. This passage is one of a number of parallel, narrow alleyways in the city centre, known collectively as the Belfast Entries. Crown Entry. Joys’ Entry. Wilson Court. Some of these are many centuries old at least in route it not material reality. It reminded me a bit of the many narrow ‘closes’ that run off the Royal Mile / High Street in Edinburgh without the steep slopes.

Source: Belfast Entries website (https://www.belfastentries.com/)

We turned into the Entry from High Street, and there it was! With no warning or information, resplendent with terracotta tiles covered in passage grave art symbols. I could barely believe my eyes – what I at first thought were spirals which were a bit like rock art resolved themselves into accurate copies of complex motifs from some of the most famous Neolithic megalithic tombs in Ireland.

It was a bit mind-blowing and the more I looked at the tiles, the more familiar motifs and symbols came into focus. Old friends and some new ones too. Weirdly, these were juxtaposed with images from newspapers covering local sporting events. I could not work out how on earth these things were connected to one another, and perhaps they were not. Maybe this is about communication, passing on shared community knowledge, being human.

Read all about it!! Newgrange! Knowth!

Magical and weird symbols danced in front of us, something of a tribute to the potentially hallucinatory nature of the original Neolithic carvings. Commuters, tourists, shoppers and assorted crowds of folk rushed past, as if the motifs were not even there. Why was everyone not marvelling at these symbols of power on this wall? What is wrong with these people?!

There was no information accompanying this arrangement of tiles, the only clue to its creation being a signature and date in the bottom left-hand corner tile. Jim MacKeever 1989 and a symbol beside it – his symbol which was perhaps inspired by Neolithic carvers. No name for the installation was provided nor was there any kind of information panel. Not even a bloody QR code, the 21st century equivalent of cups-and-rings.

I subsequently could not find out a huge amount about James MacKeever (1942-2024), who unfortunately passed away in November 2024. He was, “primarily known for his sculptures which, while being contemporary, contain reflections of a much longer history, with motifs and styles echoing the artworks of ancient civilisations. He is a long standing member of the Royal Ulster Academy of the Arts and a widely respected and collected artist” (source). I could not find much other work beyond paintings, but this UNTITLED Terracotta Clay Sculpture (which went to auction in 2011) continues the rock art theme. And indeed the same motif – source as yet unknown – appears on the Pottinger Entry tile mural bottom right in a more abridged form.

Another auctioned piece, called Newspaper Girls, strongly suggests a connection between these terracotta figures and the mural, which also combines rock art motifs with newspaper imagery. In this case, the replication is a spectacular carved kerbstone from Newgrange.

This description of MacKeever’s practice chimes with the Pottinger Entry Mural, but surprisingly I could find nothing else online about this specific piece – it may be I am using inefficient search terms online but I don’t know the reason for its commissioning, or even the name of the piece. But I do like the fact that we have passage (grave) art in a passage.

Returning to the tiles themselves, as noted, all of the motifs are faithful renditions of symbols from various Neolithic passage graves in Ireland. I did a little homework (and also got some help from Ken Williams via Twitter, and Robert Hensey) and came up with the following helpful table.

It is a cliché to say that rock art symbols are mysterious and difficult to make sense of, and so perhaps it is appropriate that this tiled masterpiece has the same opaqueness. Lost in the mists of time squared. The location of this tile installation at an liminal entry point, and a junction, strongly echoes passage grave art placement, but perhaps I am looking into this too deeply. Maybe the whole point is that we should just enjoy the dancing circles and squiggles, in the same way as I hope that the artists (now and in prehistory) took some pleasure in forming these shapes in a medium they felt comfortable working with. Never has the term rock art seemed so appropriate, but also so limited.

Acknowledgments: thanks to Becca Younger for her hospitality during our visit, and also to Robert Hensey and Ken Williams for their assistance in identifying rock art panel sources. The second photo of Knockmany is (probably) sourced from the National Museum Service.

balfarg Rock-art, Urbanisation

Do hunter gatherers dream of electric elk?

What else would we be going to look at on a suburban street called Helleristningen, other than what this Norwegian word means: the rock carving.

Situated in an area of housing in Åskollen, south of Drammen on the west side of Oslo Fjord, this street winds its way past a caged outcrop, which has carved upon it a remarkable depiction of an elk.

This is not just an Elk. It is an ELK. The creature, as carved onto a domed grey rock, measures some 2m in length, and apparently until fairly recently was the largest depiction of an Elk in this format in Norway, until a 4m long elk carving was found at Utenga, in Lier, in 2013.

Unfortunately the light and leaf clitter was appalling for viewing this site, but even so it still charmed us all.

The Åskollen mega-elk is described thus on the local Drammen History webpage (translated obviously, not by me but google, apologies):

This is a work of art from Drammen created around 6,500 years ago! There is a rock carving that you can see at Åskollen. The image is 1.75 m long, and was probably made to bring hunting luck. We don’t know the meaning of the strange marks and lines on the animal’s body, but we assume it has something to do with the magic of capture. 

(c) Drammen Historie

To my untrained idea, the patchwork pattern of lines on the side of the elk look like the guts, internal organs and cords, all of which would have been of huge use in the daily life of the hunter-gatherers who both revered and killed these beasts. (I am far from the only person who thinks this.) This depiction therefore has the quality of an X-ray, perhaps appropriate as rock carvings on outcrops like this could be viewed as marking thin places where the skin of the world is so thin that you can see its ribs.

This is emphasised today with the remnants of blood red paint filling in the lines that describe the form of the elk, fluid tracings, a practice that was once commonplace in Norway but that is now no longer approved of for conservation reasons.

The gate into this small square fenced compound has a rather threadbare metal noticeboard attached to it, with a brief paragraph of explanation for residents and visitors, in three languages (Norwegian, English, German). They have also gone for the guts theory, with an added fecundity angle towards the rump of the ‘great elk’. I was never very sure about the small bird however, even when tracing the symbols with my fingers, but I very much approve of the concept of hunting-magic.

I visited this panel in October, guided by Norwegian archaeologist Professor Håkon Glørstad, who works for the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo University. He smoothly drove me and a few other archaeologists around the west flank of the Oslo fjord on a glorious fieldtrip, taking in vast Viking burial mounds, the most northerly Neolithic dolmen in Europe, and a sea-side lunch. As we drove away from one rock art panel, Håkon made a wonderful observation about how loved elk were by the hunters – they would even have dreamt about them he said while negotiating a traffic intersection. And the rock art depictions of these creatures is indeed dreamlike – almost hallucinatory, meat and miscellaneous supplies on the hoof, a mobile IKEA. Electrifying.

This took on extra significance when he took us to see another rock art panel in the same conurbation, this one on the Forest Road in Skogerveien, but one that has evidence of rather more investment into the curation and display of the carved outcrop.

Here is a stunning panel carved with two fish, a big fish or whale, a big and small elk (mini-moose) and other forms that have variously been described as beaver, bird or bloke. This is on a suburban street corner, and is displayed within a stone compound sheltered by a curving roof, all supported by a steel frame. This elegant structure is crammed into the a corner space right beside a house, and it is something of a surprise that this structure does not have its own number and post-box. There is a real degree of discomfort here, an uneasy relationship, that is reinforced by the knowledge (from the Cultural Memory website linked to above) that “Samples were taken under the road, but the rock was blown to pieces during the road construction“. Here, prehistory and the needs of the modern world did not so much crash together as explode.

That’s a shame, as this seems to be what the bigger picture once looked like.

(c) Trond Lødøen (2017)

This is a big rock, reddish in hue – granite for goodness sake! – with the fine range of animal symbols carved over the surface having a very kinetic form, a menagerie of movement (or as MR James put it, ‘movement without sound’). There is a much more stylised elk than we saw at the other panel, almost angular, and lacking in the guts department, plus a much smaller mini-elk, perhaps a representation of perspective Father Ted style. Then there are the fish! Or are they leaves? The supposed whale is a veritable whopper, perched towards the top of the humpbacked outcrop. The detail is nicely rendered and they look almost alive, pecked and ground into life.

This set of figures is, as reported in the page for this site in the wonderful Megalithic Portal, only scratching the surface of the scale of these scratches on the surface, as the panel “consists of 46 different figures, but only 7 of them have been made possible to view for visitors”. Some may survive below the road I suppose, under which the panel slips like a petrified lava flow.

The juxtaposition of the fish and elk, of the water and the land, make this a powerful image. It suggests to me a place of flux, of a malleable materiality. This reminds me of the similarity between cup-and-ring marks, and ripples on otherwise still water: rock art somehow turns stone into liquid, and it is possible to believe that these fish are swimming through the rock. This is a rock of conflations. Lahelma (2007) has described the large elk still on display here as a ‘boat-antlered elk’, that is, the horns are also a boat motif, a relatively common combination left behind by Eurasian hunter-gatherers. The fact that the symbols must have been carved over an unknown time in relation to one another simply adds to the sense of this as an emergent narrative of contradictions and liminality.

The sense of movement that leaps out from this rock art panel is reinforced by Lahelma’s suggestion that we can fall back on more recent ethnographic accounts of hunters of the far north. For them, “both elk and boats could function as the shaman’s vehicles in the passage from this world to the other”, reinforcing my other comments about such sites being liquid, thin places. But enough – this is not a blog about rock art, fascinating as it is to speculate, but rather about the presentation to the public, and the urban setting.

Lahelma 2007 image: Skogerveien is elk b. Note the other Dramman elk is c)!

A small shiny plaque reads (and again I have translated): The securing of and information about the petroglyphs has been financed with contributions from the DNB Savings Bank Foundation [a charitable foundation] [and then some stuff about the charity].

That’s nice but not very exciting. What is exciting however is that there is a bank of light switches that, when pressed, illuminate each of the symbols carved onto the rock for a short while. This, even in the late afternoon sunlight, was a special effect that dissolves away the faint traces of red paint one can still see even on this site. Electrifying.

This creates a similar effect to the more traditional paint, but obviously is not as potentially damaging to the rock art. I would have loved to be there at night, to see this in the dark, this nocturnal canvas, and I know that there is a school of thought that prehistoric sites such as this may well have been designed to view by moonlight. This is also perhaps when some of these animals would be most comfortable and relaxed. It made me wonder: do hunter gatherers dream of electric elk?

There is a rather less innovative noticeboard at the bottom of the street that I confess I was only able to photograph rather badly from the car!

These two rock art panels are in their own right rather wonderful, and it was interesting to see how they have been absorbed into the urban world so comfortably, almost effortlessly. The Åskollen panel shows an earlier iteration of this process, with a street name and cage combination that works effectively enough. The deep red paint traces that remain here are indicative of this site being representative of an earlier ethos for the study and presentation of these sites, but the main thing is that it remains, and was not compromised or moved to make way for houses. The Skogerveien panel is startingly futuristic, the curves, steel and neon giving this ancient rock a science fiction look, the animal symbols carved onto the side almost like branding that someone was paid a million pounds to design. This site is closer to houses but also feels more removed, almost cave-like in its form, the fish and elk looking to escape from the 21st century hunter-gatherers camped all around them, the last survivors in the tarmac jungle.

There is no doubt that in Norway they know how to do urban prehistory well!

Sources and acknowledgements: firstly I would like to give a big thanks to Håkon Glørstad for taking us on this day trip which involved a lot of driving! Thanks also to the archaeologists who joined us on the day, Rosie Bishop, Ingrid Mainland, and Astrid Nyland. We had a lot of fun!

Source cited: Antti Lahelma 2007 ‘On the Back of a Blue Elk’: Recent Ethnohistorical Sources and ‘Ambiguous’ Stone Age Rock Art at Pyhänpää, Central Finland, Norwegian Archaeological Review, 40:2, 113-137

Trond Lødøen 2017 The Meaning and Use(-fulness) of Traditions in Scandinavian Rock Art Research. DOI:10.2307/j.ctvh1dpgg.5

balfarg Cochno Stone, Rock-art

Lot 172

Me, tracing my fingers in and out of the coarse surface of cupmarks on a stone in the sun, with red paint marks on the rock beside me. Again. Not in Faifley, but Oslo.

To be precise this happened on a walk with fellow archaeologist Ingrid Mainland in Ekebergparken, on the south side of the harbour fjord of the Norwegian capital city. The park is better known for a stunning collection of sculptures and art installations, and a fine hunter-gatherer rock art panel near the entrance to the park, decorated with elk, deer and hunting images.

This particular rock are panel, and connections between rock art and contemporary artworks in the park, will be discussed in more depth in my Bloomsbury Contemporary Archaeology of Prehistory book [link to be added when the book is actually published!] but in this blog post I want to specifically focus on the cupmarks that I traced with my fingers.

There are a lot of cupmarked stones in the park and on its fringes, belonging to a later carving tradition, scattered on outcrops across higher points of the landscape than the hunting panel. They are in the woods, beside paths, and in a caravan and camping site.

The cupmarks we visited were marked on a map showing heritage sites in the park.

To get there, we walked via a very steep uphill path called the Mesolithic Climb, enjoying increasingly stunning views over the city and the relatively newly opened Munch Museum. This path was marked with noticeboards outlining some of the prehistoric discoveries in the area, in some cases marking the height in the landscape of former waterlines.

The cupmarks were not as clearly signposted however, and so we used a mobile-phone-taken photo of the map with heritage sites marked on it to orientate ourselves. We paused as we passed a stunning and complex moving pair of sinuous stainless steel rods, a piece called The Dance by British artist George Cutts (2013). The guidebook to the park, and park website, notes that, the:

“slim, elegant forms keep shifting in an enthralling and almost mesmerizing dance. The artist presents us with optical illusions and plays with the interaction between shapes“.

It was indeed hypnotic, but it is also interesting to reflect on how this description could also be applied to a rock surface carved with cups and rings. Hypnotic curves that were perhaps themselves the product of trance-like states, materialised in repeated circular actions.

We walked on, out of the park, into the caravan and camping site, which by the late summer / early autumn already had an air of abandonment about it, with only a few campervans and caravans in their plots in defiance of the changing of the season. As we walked from outcrop to outcrop, displaying the mad stooping gait of archaeologists on the hunt, breakfasting couples sat at white plastic tables outside their caravan door, watching us as they chewed.

Google Maps

We noticed that the campsite had been laid out in a patchwork of parched working plots, defined by increasingly faded boundaries, that nonetheless spoke of territoriality. Some boulders drew our attention, because they straddled a ridged space that nibbled into four plots. Their liminal positioning and irregular form, unfriendly to vehicle chassis, meant that it could not be a plot in its own right. It was four plots but no plot at all. But it was besides Plot 172. Plot 172 adjacent if you will.

The boulders are, in fact, part of an improvised stone circle, which Ingrid spotted while I was too busy on my knees with the cupmarks on the outcrop that they surround. The outcrop itself is subcircular, a couple of metres in diameter, with a modest collection of small cupmarks that become slightly less modest the more one looks and gets your eye in.

The cupmarks sat within a grid-like pattern of straight cracks in the rock, and beside them was a bold streak of red spray paint, a large L with a swirl coming from the angle. The colourful palette was enhanced by white blotches of lichen, and deep green moss intruding through the cracks in the rock face. The rock itself, fifty shades of grey, and sedimentary I think, was rough to the touch, but the cupmarks were smooth with time.

An information board was fixed to one of the standing stones, and was – and this is perfectly understandable – written in Norwegian. Aside from a very brief paraphrasing of the main text in a short paragraph in English. There was also a photo of the cupmarks, rendered redundant by the existence of the actual cupmarks 2m to the right of the noticeboard, and a map depicting other cupmarks in the area, most of which seem to be in the surrounding woodland.

I painstakingly translated the Norwegian. This type of carved motif is called a Skalgroper, which translates in English as ‘bowl pit’, a variant on cupmark. (The a should have a wee circle or ring above it, a diacritic shared by a number of languages, not just Nordic ones.) The text goes on to explain that this is the most common rock art symbol in Norway, and they were probably carved between the Bronze Age and early Iron Age periods. They may be associated with places in the landscape where people were farming, perhaps summer pastorage, and their meaning “leaves a lot of room for interpretation”. Rather wonderfully the noticeboard text also says: “Rock art probably has a connection with the imaginary world of the past”. There is also some text that relates to the management of the site, including avoiding walking on the stone (did my crawling contravene this?) and adding that it is “illegal to light bonfires on the rock face”.

Lodoen and Mandt, in their 2010 study, The rock art of Norway, dedicate some time in the book to discussing possible interpretations for cupmarks. There were historic folk tales, and work by early archaeologists, that defined recurring associations with sacrifice and deposition, the marks being used as cups or bowls to contain food offerings, blood or milk. Fertility was also a broad early theme, albeit it fuzzily defined. However, more recent concerns with placing the symbols in the context of the rock they are carved upon, and placing the rock in the wider landscape, have been more fruitful lines of enquiry. This has led to a relationship being identified between these carvings, and summer grazing.

“The cup mark sites lie almost without exception in lush, mountain pastureland with ample access to fresh drinking water … cup marks are also found along the paths between mountain farms or on the cattle tracks from the permanent farms up to the mountains” (page 193).

In other words these symbols, at least in sub-Alpine Norway, tend to be found in places that have, historically, been used as summer grazing zones in the landscape, an association that might reasonably be pushed back into prehistory, in a landscape that has always been challenging to farm. This interpretation is by no means definitive, but these simple symbols speak of people who had time on their hands, and with a desire to leave their mark on the land.

A nearby cupmarked outcrop, back in the park itself, has its own information panel, which repeats much of the same information, and a viewing platform. Shrouded in the patchy shadows of trees, with flickering light on the surface, these cupmarks were alive with light and shadow, but more difficult to identify. This made be realise that the local environs of these symbols may well have played a role in how easy they were to carve, see, and use. This woodland setting, as opposed to the open and shadowless cupmarked stone in the campsite, was also a perfect environment for more extensive moss and lichen coverage. This was a hairier stone.

The plan view of cupmarks, the circle form, was chosen in the park to symbolise the symbol, becoming a leitmotif for the motif. A metal plate laid across the pathway in the park indicated that you were passing Skalgroper in a most literal and visual form. Circles and letters, letters and circles. Our symbols … and theirs.

SKALGROPFELT: bowl pit field, a collection of cupmarks stones. Although we could not find any more.

Back in the charming museum for the park, near the entrance and tram stop, the cupmarks were again depicted in 2-dimensional circular format, this time in an abstract wall display.

The small information panel described these as “mysterious rock carvings” and perhaps they are, although they are only mysteries if one focuses on what they meant, because we can never know. But why does what they meant matter? The intention was surely bodily – the repose watching cows flicking flies, the scrape of stone on stone, rubbing, losing oneself, imprinting yourself into the hard rock, bending its surface for many, many lifetimes.

“Perhaps the motif – the cup mark itself – was not of prime importance, but rather the very act of carving out a section in the rock” wrote Lodoen and Mandt (pg 199), and others have expressed this sense too.

This is a timeless human act. By tracing my fingers along the concave bowls on the carved rock overlapping with Lot 172, I continued to deepen this mark, atom by atom, leaving behind my DNA until the rains come.

Sources and acknowledgements: I would like to thank Ingrid for her company of this walk, and for her observation skills and insightful thoughts.

Our time in Oslo is being funded by the Centre for Advanced Studies, working with Dr Rosie Bishop on the Climate, Crops and Crisis project, for which I am extremely grateful.

Sources referred to in the text are:

Trond Lodoen and Gro Mandt 2010 The Rock Art of Norway, Windgather Press, 2010

TC Jensen (ed) 2022 Ekebergparken Guide (English). Oslo: Ekebergparken.

balfarg Urban standing stones, Weird

The ‘Spoons stone

“Why does that Wetherspoons have a drawing of a standing stone outside?” I asked incredulously a few months back during a visit to the soon-to-be levelled down (funded by levelling up money) Cumbernauld Antonine shopping centre. Soon followed by, “…and it is called The Carrick Stone!”. Little more encouragement was needed to go inside to, er, investigate, the schematic drawing of a lumpy standing stone on a wooden panel drawing me in.

Me, investigating

Through information panels in the pub and a visit to canmore, I quickly established a real blind spot in my knowledge of North Lanarkshire archaeology – that there is a putative Roman altar stone in the new town of Cumbernauld. How did I not know this? I guess because it is ‘Roman’ but frankly a wee standing stone is a wee standing stone, and so I followed it up. And there must have been Iron Age folk about at the time who scratched their head upon seeing this stone. Surely the Empire could do better than that?

The Carrick Stone is a rather enigmatic lump of Roman Scotland, located currently (originally? perhaps not) on a ridge to the south of the Antonine Wall. However, there is some confusion as to whether monolith really was traditionally called this or not (certainly not by the Romans!) which matters as the name was a farm, and is now an area of Cumbernauld. Let’s not worry about whether it is Carrick Stone or Carrickstone please.

In the 1845 New Statistical Account, Watson notes the existence of the stone in the already so-named Carrickstone Farm that he thought looked like a Roman altar, although a story was also noted that it “has a hole in it, where, tradition says, Robert the Bruce planted his standard before the battle of Bannockburn”. It may be here that Watson was conflating two different stones as we will see.

The stone was documented in some detail by William Donelly towards the end of the 19th century. His short note was entitled:

NOTE OF A STONE ON THE MOOR NEAR DULLATUR, CALLED THE CARRICK STONE, SHAPED LIKE A ROMAN ALTAR, AND HAVING CUPS ON ITS UPPER SURFACE. WITH A DRAWING.

Here’s the drawing:

The stone was described by Donelly who was fixated with what he saw as large cupmarks on top which he felt meant the Roman attribution was dodgy. He repeated the Watson story about Bruce but also did some investigation into the farm name and found the confusion, the farm being named for a nearby large slab with CARRICK written on it, with records of the farm name going back to 1401. What we now call the Carrick Stone was generally known rather more mundanely as the standing stone or the Roman altar.

There is a later note in canmore from an OS fieldworker in 1957 suggesting that the letters CAR could be seen on the altar. But this additionally confusing observation was soon shut down: “This stone is a Roman Altar. The stone is now in a mutilated condition, and any original inscription has been obliterated. Its general shape, however, and such traces of mouldings as survive round its base and head show it to be undoubtedly Roman” (letter from Kenneth Steer dated December 1957 also quoted in canmore).

OS record card, later transcribed into canmore (c) HES canmore_image_SC02430347

So far as I can tell there is no evidence to say that this is definitively a Roman altar stone although it is described as such by RCAHMS (1982) and is included on their excellent 2008 Antonine Wall map. Patricia Weeks, then Antonine Wall World Heritage Site Co-ordinator, added notes to canmore in 2017 to the effect that this was very likely Roman, but badly weathered.

“The Roman altar known as the Carrick Stone is one of the less well-known Roman sites in Scotland, but it is unusual in that it may still stand in its original location after nearly 2000 years, albeit in the surroundings of a housing estate”.

Certainly it is featured in the 2012 Roman national panel of Scotland’s Archaeological Research Framework. In section 4.5, Landscapes of Belief, it is noted that, “one altar is believed still to stand in its original position, offering remarkable opportunities for research – the Carrick Stane, sitting forlornly in a housing estate at Cumbernauld” and the proximity of both Antonine Wall and the Roman forts at Westerwood and Castlecary is useful context. It is speculated in ScARF that this altar was once part of a temple, perhaps still waiting to be found. (See here for loads more great AW content.)

Personally the surrounding houses and water storage towers that bothered the writers quoted above only added to the allure for me, and so I embarked on a campaign of fieldwork that involved visiting the actual Carrick Stone, followed by another visit for lunch and a pint at the Carrick Stone pub.

I parked nearby in the drizzle and tried to orientate myself, quickly coming across a sign on the path to the stone suggesting this track followed a 2000 year old route, the Via Pavii. (Latin for paved road.)

Within a minute I was there, and frankly it was an underwhelming experience.

There it was, all stumpy and lumpy, a stone rottweiler of a megalith, squatting in the grass and for all I know disobeying dog toilet instructions stuck onto a nearby lamppost. The overgrown grass, victim of council cutbacks by not being cut back, caressed its grey sides in the light breeze, and nettles stood guard. I straddled over the fence, laid my hands on the cratered but smooth top surface, and squatted to examine the side carvings or lack thereof. My ankles and knees were lightly dampened by the experience.

Indeed the urban setting and the fence dampened down the impact of this stone, but upon turning round things started to get interesting.

Looming over the stone was one of two water towers on this hill, amidst the housing and a network of roads and paths, propped up on concrete legs that I could not see but I knew were there. These towers have always struck me as looking like abandoned alien spacecraft. Via Pavii indeed.

I am not the only one to be bemused by the experience of visiting this site so it seems. The Carrick Stone has one of the most amusing TripAdvisor pages I have seen with two spoof 5 star reviews posted several years apart. Someone even created a comedy user name (Walter Stone) simply to post a nonsensical review.

Perhaps this is a stone that simply attracts derision, even if it is clear there is a lot of local concern for the monument, with ongoing complaints about the lack of grass cutting at the site, and it was locals and the local council that got the informative noticeboard erected in the recent past – including in Gaelic (but not Latin).

That past visitors took chips away as souvenirs may explain its weird form, but also offers a point of comparison with Stonehenge.

I am also interested in the evolution of the presentation of this stone: caged megaliths tend to have interesting modern biographies in relation to attempts to present them to the public and, to an extent, protect them from visitors. This monument is no exception!

Old record card showing the original crappy cage (c) HES canmore_image_SC02430349
Unknown date with same fence even crappier (c) Fraser Hunter / ScARF
Photo from 2007 showing the red phase (c) Creative Commons BJ Smur
Undated photo from the HS photo collection before weeds took over (c) HES

The next part of the trip was lunch and a pint of brown stuff at the actual Carrick Stone pub, one of the Wetherspoons chain. Say what you want about this much maligned brand, but they usually have good historical detail in the websites for each pub, and this one is no different. As I had seen on my first visit, inside the pub there are also some information panels, in a kind of scrapbook form, that historically contextualise the locality and the Carrick Stone itself.

Even before entering, of course, there is the stylised and oversized drawing of the stone itself, black on wood, pictured above, but there is also a plaque on the wall beside a second entrance which explains the name of the ‘free house’ a little, and repeats the Bruce connection.

Inside the Bruce story is depicted to the maxium(us) effect, with two panels focusing on Bruce and the Battle of Bannockburn. (Why would Bruce have been in Cumbernauld just before that famous 1314 battle!? As it happens we went there for lunch at more like 1414.)

I love this one – the random Roman distance slab in the corner, assorted images of the Bruce and the battle, and the curious suggestion he beat the ‘British’ on that day.

The next image, hidden in a darker corner (and cursed by a Home Bargains reflection), focuses on Bannockburn again, and some ornate script on a drawing of a parchment repeats the connection between the Carrick Stone, Bruce’s big stick, and the battle, depicted in drawing format with Stirling Castle perched in the corner.

The Carrick Stone is an ancient monument standing in what is known as the new town of Carrickstone. This is where according to local tradition, Robert the Bruce planted his standard before the Battle of Bannockburn.

And there is Bruce again on my menu!!

The best has been saved to last, a really nice panel that focuses on the Antonine Wall, which is great to see, especially if you were to sit on one of the stools about 3 inches from it.

The Ant wall is shown in map form. Tick. An old school Historic Scotland sign is included. Tick. There is even an image of the famous lilia at Rough Castle fort near Bonnybridge. Tick and smiley face. The text is even OK if in a wonky font. But what on earth are all of the other stone buildings depicted here? The Antonine Wall is not actually a stone wall as I never tire of telling my students. But the whole effect is rather pleasing.

The sad thing is that this was something of a building at risk survey, as the shopping mall within which this pub is located is to be bulldozed, I assume with the free house, the Wetherspoons’ carpet, and all those lovely signs now counting down the days until they go the way of the Empire. And there are other nice things in here – poems, references to local public art, photos of old Cumbernauld village. Not so much the toilets though. On borrowed time.

The 2022 decision by HES not to List the famous brutalist shopping centre was probably one nail in the coffin, loved by architects and hated by anyone who doesn’t like buildings that look like they came from the sets of a Soviet science fiction film.

And also under threat is an endearing bit of almost hidden urban prehistory that I have photographed every time I have walked past it over the last few years, usually while lost in the maze of corridors and stairwells in this part of the mall.

Cumbernauld rock art

Demolition will happen within 10 years (according to the Council) so you have not got long to explore the shopping mall, the Via Pavii, and the pub! I can recommend all three experiences….

Sources and acknowledgments: thanks to Jan as usual for accompanying me on the fieldwork for this blog and ordering food using the app on her phone due to Wifi problems at my end.

Donelly, W A. 1897 Note of a stone on the moor near Dullatur, called the Carrick Stone, shaped like a Roman altar, and having cups on its upper surface, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 31, 1896-7, Pages 228-30. Download here.

RCAHMS 1982 The archaeological sites and monuments of Cumbernauld and Kilsyth District and Strathkelvin District, Strathclyde Region, The archaeological sites and monuments of Scotland series no 2. Revision. Edinburgh. Page: 8, No.12 

balfarg Urban standing stones

Stone cult

What if standing stones were not erected in the Neolithic period as a focal point for ceremony and ritual, but rather the stones themselves were the object of worship?

This startling thought (not an original one I’m sure) came to me during a Neolithic Studies Group field visit to Yorkshire in May 2024. In particular the massive megaliths at the Devil’s Arrow and Rudston imposed themselves on my thinking with their extravagance. All of these stones were – so the story goes – at one point or another thrown by the Devil, medieval rationalisation for inexplicable pagan profanities. They certainly threw me.

Climbing from my hire car into an already warm sun on that May morning, the Devil’s Arrows were part of an assault on the senses. Two of the stones stood to attention in a scrubby field decorated with shell middens and chicken shit left there recently by the farmer, unctuous organic mounds that teemed with bird life, offerings for the fertility of the field in an acknowledgement that the stones don’t work like that anymore.

The following day we went to Rudston via Duggleby Howe barrow. The view upon entering the church yard within which this might megalith is contained is dominated by the giant standing stone, reputedly and measurably the tallest standing stone in Britain. It protrudes grotesquely from amongst gravestones which look tiny by comparison, clustered around its base like hungry children crowding a giant waiting for crumbs from his table.

The stone is a deep grey brown sedimentary with various markings on its surface that can’t quite be resolved into any shapes or forms no matter how long one stares. And one does stare, as it is difficult to take one’s eyes off this giant. Perhaps most startling of all of the protective metal cap sitting on top of the stone, like a helmet jammed onto the head of a petrified orc.

Taking stock, the NSG great and good sat around eating lunch, and then congregated at the foot of the stone, hopelessly dominated. Archaeologists have always been driven to visit this stone, drawn to this place, to try to make sense of it while not being overwhelmed or overly emotional. (It is just a standing stone after all.) This is not however a standing stone that can be theorised or measured into making sense, being pretty much impossible to excavate. Sometimes one had to admit defeat and be struck by awe.

Archaeologist Ian Kinnes at Rudston on a previous NSG trip in March 1987 (c) Gordon Barclay

The church is overshadowed by the monolith literally and in all other respects. Literature produced and sold in the Church tells us more about the stone than the church, reinforcing the sense that the real focus of rites in this place is the monolith and not the messiah.

For instance, a whole pamphlet is dedicated to The Monolith and contains an eccentric and even feverish narrative about the pagan origins of the stone and this place, written by a W W Gatenby (who died in 2001). “If we turn to the book of Joshua in the Old Testament, we read that when Joshua destroyed the city of Jericho [itself a Neolithic site], rather more than 2,000 BC, he found two tall standing stones outside the temple of the pagan god Baal”. In this, WWG saw symbolically at least the upright nature of the church steeple, pointing to the heavens, but then so does the monolith.

However, unlike the church spire, the standing stone also points down to the underworld. A pamphlet called “All Saints” Church, Rudston. A short guide (date and author unknown) notes than, “An excavation conducted by Sir William Strickland in the late 18th century suggested that its depth below ground is as great as its height”. Hmm, unlikely, but then what is this standing stone standing on? A giant tooth set into the gums of the land.

A postcard sold in the church bear the legend on the back: “PARISH CHURCH OF ALL SAINTS AND RUDSTON MONOLITH” without a comma, suggesting that this church even bears the name of the stone. “Over 25 feet high, this Bronze Age stone is the largest monolith in Britain, and was probably a pagan worship monument” it continues.

There must surely have been – and perhaps still is – a cult of Rudston, with the standing stone being the ultimate relic, maintained in conspiracy by whispering locals. Some kind of relict survivor of the ‘indigenous pagan religion’ as discussed in the church pamphlet that the construction of the church was supposed to put a stop to. Inside the church is a painting of the standing stone (and the church and graveyard), prints available for £30. Here the stone looks even bigger than its 8m height. The stark grey depiction of the stone has decolourised it: prehistory seems to be black and white, a simpler time.

This is heightened by the sense that the standing stone and church-mound sit in the apex of a much larger sacred landscape, with five cursus monuments radiating outwards (or inwards) from the monolith. This is depicted in a strange 3D model display in the church, and also the reality for local people that some of them probably have a cursus ditch under their gardens and houses.

All of this is held together by the glue of the Gypsey Race, a river that bisects four of the cursus monuments and would have had to be crossed were these routes to be followed. There is an entanglement here of water and stone, place and people.

Because these are stones with communities – houses sit nearby, bedroom windows overlook them, and they are at the very least peri-urban. I can’t help but think that simply looking out of a window at massive standing stones day after day must have some kind of psychological impact on even the most unimaginative of individuals.

They even have streets named in their honour, a further input into the everyday psychology of living with megaliths.

Julian Cope has written about the Arrows bemoaning this urban setting: “the vile and claustrophobic situation in which the Devil’s Arrows have now found themselves” is down to the Romans building a road through this sacred landscape and subsequent developments of that road (now a motorway which hums pleasingly in the background).

From The Modern Antiquarian

For what it is worth, I prefer to think that there is a healthy children of the stones vibe at the Devil’s Arrows.

While at Rudston, legendary archaeologist Richard Bradley told us a remarkable story. During a journey to examine a thesis (in 1979?) he stopped in at the churchyard, suit and tie, the whole business. It was raining and preparations were underway for a funeral. He peered down into a freshly cut grave and spotted the profile of a ditch in section in the graveside. Unable to carry out any further investigation, this nonetheless suggested to Bradley that this might have been the remnants not of a cursus but rather some kind of enclosure around the eminence upon which the monolith and church sit.

This brought to mind a prehistoric horror set at a very similar church in rural England, the one investigate during the 2014 film The Borderlands (aka Final Prayer). This spectacular found footage film (spoiler alert) ended with the revelation that a huge ancient creature lived beneath the church, in the hill, periodically digesting (or being fed) humans. Those who had worshipped this beast had carved tunnels into the hill and adorned them with arcane rock art symbols, and set up altars for rites. Perhaps without precedent in the history of horror films, evidence was also produced during the film of an archaeological aerial photograph showing several concentric rings of earthwork enclosing the hilltop and church.

Screengrab from The Borderlands

When Bradley’s told us about his graveside discovery, a shiver went down my spine. What was enclosed here? What was being kept within? Or lurking beneath our feet?

The most obvious answer is not a beast, but the stone. No matter how hard Christianity tries to push back!

The Menhir of Saint-Uzec (source)

Standing stones have been revered for millennia and continue to be repurposed for reverence. Crosses have been stuck atop then (as may have been the case at Rudston (source)), murals painted, symbols carved. Some have been placed in cages or glass houses. Standing stones have a uncontainable power that we seem unable to control, and they can shape-change to be anything we want them to be. The late Chris Tilley has written (The Materiality of Stone, 2004) about the kinetic energy of standing stones, many of which look as if they are about to move, or have moved when our eyes were elsewhere. I think that this is because deep down we see them as much more than inorganic matter. They are literally smeared with our DNA and entangled with our bodies and minds, living stone. Worthy of our attention and respect.

On the day after my first visit to see the Arrows, I went back again the following morning, to break bread and drink coffee in the shadow of the stones (with window closed due to the smell).

In the flat morning light they seemed much smaller, the nervous energy of the day before having dissipated. And then I realised that is because (a) I was further away, and (b) these are stones that need an audience, a groups of willing supplicants to crowd around and marvel, to bend the knee, take photographs, recite our litanies of dates, measurements, facts and anecdotes. Our archaeological knowledge is in fact nothing more than a series of incantations, rites of worship and, even if we might not admit it, adoration. Neolithic hobbyists are the perfect congregation for these giant monoliths, academic acolytes celebrating the cult of stones. Archaeologists are the cultists.

What will we one day awake through our endless meddling?

It’s behind you…..

Sources and acknowledgements – I would like to thank all those who came on the NSG trip to Yorkshire. I picked a lot of brains but none of them could have anticipated where my thoughts would lead me. Especial thanks to Emma Watson and Seren Griffiths. Sources for images and words used in the blog post can be found in the text and captions.