When I'm asked which are my favourite sites in Northumberland, I have to begin with Old Bewick, because this is the very first rock art site that I saw. And unknown to me at the time, it was the actual rock discovered by John Charles Langlands in the 1820's, which set out the whole agenda for the discovery of British rock art. It's a great big boulder sitting on the side of a hill and the whole of the surface has been utilised by people who were making cup and ring marks on it. They don't start with a fixed idea in their minds, they tend to look at the rock surface itself and work on from there. Now that it a very spectacular rock, about the size of a mini car, but the setting is also terribly important in rock art, because here we have a landscape which is rich in all kinds of things: hill forts, cairns and other panels of rock art. Now it also is important to me this site because I excavated, with a help of a large number of young people, the Blawearie cairn which is not all that far away, and there we had a huge burial cairn which had been used as a cemetery throughout the late Neolithic - Bronze Age. So what you have here is a total landscape in which rock art plays a very important part.
Chatton Park Hill and Ketley Crag Rock Shelter
On Chatton Park Hill there is an enormous panel of rock art with a dominant view across the river Till right through to the Cheviot Hills. This site has been known since the 19th century, so it isn't my discovery, but the complexity of it, the sheer volume of concentric circles, that the largest figure having concentric circles up to about a metre in diameter, is quite breathtaking. But the most important thing about Chatton Park Hill is its position in the landscape, because it is totally dominant as a viewpoint. Now, on the side of that hill is a site that we call Ketley Crag. It's actually a natural rock overhang, and it was discovered quite recently that the floor was covered with cup and ring marks. And again like the best of the rock art, the people who made these have taken into account the natural formation of the rock itself, the indentations, and they have produced, what is by any standards, a work of art. Now what is interesting thing is that we have several rock shelters in Northumberland which have produced burials of the Early Bronze Age. We can't actually date rock art itself, and here at Ketley Crag we have something of a mystery because the floor of the rock shelter doesn't seem to have contained any burials. The site was excavated, incidentally, by badgers who live in the rock behind the rock shelter. In fact when I was recording this site by making a rubbing, I could hear them all busily at work at the back there. There was snow all around me but the floor of the rock shelter was dry, so this site has another important context for me, namely the time when I actually recorded it. Again it's got a superb view, right down a stream valley running into the River Till and across to the hills
Buttony is a most extraordinary outcrop of stone, fell sandstone, which is covered with some beautiful designs. I've chosen this one not only because the panels themselves are spectacular with their multiple concentric circles around a central cup from which a groove runs down the rock, or for the rosette patterns which are found on that, there's a tremendous variety of design over the whole outcrop of rock. But for the fact that it would originally, had there been no forest, been one of the main viewpoints in that area. It overlooks the River Till, as it breaks its way through, at Weetwod Bridge, onto the Milfield Plain, which is a very important site with henges and all kinds of other prehistoric survivals. But the other reason for choosing this is that a forest has been allowed to be planted all the way round these fantastic art forms. Now this has been a terrible mistake, it's calamitous that such a forest was allowed to be planted, and we are not talking about a very long time ago, we are talking about recent times, when the thoughts about archaeology and about its preservation should have been far more important in the minds of the planners who allowed this to happen. So there we have a marvellous site which today you have to intrude into planted coniferous woodland, to find, and yet when I first recorded this, first discovered it, it was in a completely open area.
There is a site at West Lilburn, on the side of a hill, where in the 19th century some people who were digging up the field, or ploughing it up, discovered a burial site. It's a very unusual pit burial, with about ten different cremations on two layers. Each of these cremations had a little piece of whinstone on top of it. Now this pit contained two stones, and one of them is in the Museum of Antiquities at Newcastle, in the store, and it has a fantastic spiral pattern on it. The stone itself is broken, and the suggestion here is that the stone had already got this design on it before it was incorporated into the burial. Now we've been looking at rock art sites which are in the landscape, these are impossible to date on their own, but when you find them in an actual context, the stone which is buried with the burial represents the latest phase of that burial, although the rock art of course can be earlier. So what we have at Lilburn is a possible Neolithic pit burial with spirals associated with it. Now you wouldn't put rock art into burial unless the rock art itself has some important ritual or what we might call religious significance.
The site that I excavated at Fowberry proved to be one of the most important in Britain, because what we discovered was a twenty metre outcrop of rock which was decorated throughout the whole of its length taking into account all the natural indentations on the rock, and on the top of this was superimposed a double circle cairn. The cairn itself is very interesting because four of the stones within the curve have cup marks on them; they are still in situ. But the cairn itself was made up of small cobbles which had been brought in from field clearance presumably, and over twenty of them had cup marks incorporated into them, deliberately placed there. Now not far away is another site at Weetwod, that I excavated, which had been three quarters bulldozed, where there were over thirty stones in the cairn - the one still in situ faced downwards - with pristine rock art on them. Now here we have a very important statement, because it means that the cairns themselves, which may or may not have been burial cairns - we don't know this for certain - actually incorporated rock art and therefore this gave additional importance to the cairns; and again we have this link between ritual, or burial, and the use of rock art. The site of Fowberry has been allowed to grow over since we excavated it, and this is the wish of the man who owns it, and I can understand this, and so it has, as it were, gone back into nature. But the whole of the Fowberry-Weetwood area is one of the richest grounds for prehistoric rock art in the world.
Roughting Linn is the largest panel of rock art in England. It's in the most beautiful area and the name of the rock comes from a small waterfall, in a beautiful secluded valley, and Roughting actually means bellowing like a bull, and a Linn is a pond. In the area too there is a totally unexcavated enclosure made of several very impressive curving walls and ditches. And then we have the rock art panel itself. This is covered with a whole variety of motifs, some of them are the usual circular concentric circles around central cups with a groove coming down the rock, but there are many clusters of cups and rosette forms, there are arcs, there is a tremendous variety of depth of execution of these motifs. Now the problem with Roughting Linn is that because it is such a large rock it is visited by many people. But unfortunately the display there is atrocious; there is an enormously ugly ministry of works notice board there, which tells you practically nothing of any value. And what should happen to this site is that it should be first of all properly managed, it should be cleaned up – there are many rock art motifs that have been covered with heather, and casual visitors have been pulling this heather away from the edges - and also it should have a notice board which shows people precisely what is on the rock, in other words a first class drawing possibly supported by some photographs.
Weetwood Moor is almost like a plateau of outcropped fell sandstone, with tremendous views all the way round, views that show all the other sites in the area, such as Chatton Park Hill, Amerside Law, right through to Ros Castle and to Old Bewick. It is a very spectacular place. It has a cairn which, I've excavated, which has rock art in it. But it's been known for a very long time, since about the 1840s-1850s, for large groups of concentric circles in one particular patch at the top of the plateau - the plateau actually slightly slopes away. This is an enormously beautiful and very, very attractive panel of rock art, but in addition to that there are many minor things that people tend to overlook. And when I began to record this area in detail, there were literally hundreds of cups and rings to be found scattered over a very, very wide area, right through to the most north westerly panel which is now in a wood - unfortunately it's another one of these woods that has been allowed to grow all over extremely good rock art - looking down over a much lower area where there are one or two cairns, one of which has rock art in it, and again this is a site that has not yet been investigated. So at Weetwod we have beautiful rock art, at a tremendous viewpoint, but we also have the additional interest of having cairns, some of them excavated and some not, that contain rock art.
Coldmartin rock art lies on the fringes of a great bowl of land and looks down upon water. Now the rock art has been known for quite some time, but what is so interesting about it is that the area suggests straight away that this would be the perfect place for nomadic herdsmen and hunters, either to shoot animals, to trap animals at the water's edge, or to bring down beasts to drink at the water there. It's interesting that the rock art lies above the water, looking down on it, and here one has the impression that the rock art has been put there to mark a very, very important part in people's lives, a place that was vital to their very survival. It is possible too that settlements were down in the valley below, but we mustn't forget that herding and hunting have always played a very vital part in prehistoric peoples' existence.
Lordenshaw, south of Rothbury, is fortunately within the boundaries of the National Park, as a result of which the area has been protected from cattle by an agreement with the land owner, although sheep obviously still graze there. It has also been very well displayed with pamphlets and notice boards on site, in compete contrast for example to Roughting Linn, which is privately owned and not subject to this kind of attention. It has some very, very fine rock art, including the large outcrop which has been partly quarried away; you can actually see the wedge marks where this was cut through. It stands in a dominant position, as much of this rock art does, it has a very, very ancient public works notice board next to it, which is in itself an ancient monument, and it's covered with all kinds of symbols, many of which seem to be eroding. Below it there is another ridge, and here is a very famous rock called the Horseshoe Rock, which actually lies on the edge of a cairn. There are other cairns on the Lordenshaw area, and these too have cup marks on them, so there is a very definite link established here between the use of rock art and the burial of the dead. The east side of Lordenshaw is characterised by some very, very large channels that follow natural lines down the rock, many of them beginning in very large basins, and this is a characteristic of this area. So what we have is almost like a processional way coming down from the Whitton Burn to the north, right through the rock art and through a whole series of burials, and then at the very top of this ridge is a very large pre-Roman fort, which may well have swept away some prehistoric survival such as cairns and rock art there.
The rock art at Tod Crag lies in a fairly remote area of Northumberland, and there is only one major panel at the edge of a forest that has recently been felled. This panel is different from others in Northumberland in that you have concentric circles without having a cup with a groove coming out of the centre. Not only that, but the concentric circles are themselves arranged in an arc. There is also an example here of what we might call superimposition or one lot of rock art being put on at a later stage from another. The kind of curvature of the arrangement of these concentric circles has suggested to many people that this has some sort of an astronomical purpose, but I doubt that, it's just simply that people are kind of superimposing a view of the world, their own view of the world onto prehistoric people. There is no evidence that rock art and astronomy are in any way linked, at least it hasn't yet been demonstrated.
Hartleyburn Common and Kellah Burn lie in the south of the county in an area not visited by very, very many people; it hasn't got the popularity of the north of the county. However, here we have discovered quite a lot of prehistoric settlements, and among these settlements are panels of rock art. Yet one in particular is very interesting, it stands on a little plateau overlooking the stream, and it's a big slab absolutely covered with cups, all of which show every pick mark and the way they were made. This shows us that cup marks were actually made by impacting a hard stone chisel onto the rock, possibly with the aid of a mallet. Some of the cup marks are actually joined together by grooves, and some of them are partly enclosed by grooves. So here we have a very large slab, which may well have come from a destroyed burial cairn, it may be part of a cist, lying in a very remote area.
There is a site at Ingoe, called Sandyway Heads; it's actually the name of a house there. Ingoe itself is one of these names in Northumberland where the whole part of it, as in Prudhoe and Swinhoe and so on, means a ridge of land, and this is in fact what it is, it's a ridge of land. Outside the cottage there is a really beautifully executed panel of rock art, of concentric circles around a cup through which a radial groove passes and then comes down the rock. It's a very well balanced design, but what is very interesting is that on the other side are the beginnings of other cups. Now the fact that the slab is marked on two sides immediately makes one think that perhaps it has come out of a burial cairn. If it were just displaced outcrop, then it obviously wouldn't have pick markings on the obverse side from the design. Now it is quite conceivable that in this area there was much more in prehistoric times than we can see today, that the panel is called a portable, which means that it has been carried away from its original place, but it the field near by there is a large standing stone called The Warrior Stone which has cup marks on it, so it's quite conceivable that here we have another area which had some sort of ritual significance in prehistoric times and that this panel sitting so comfortably now alongside some stones which were used for grinding corn, quern stones as we call them, that this area was in fact very important in prehistoric times.
The Goatstones near to Wark are four stones arranged at the corners of a square. One of them has a considerable number of quite deep cups on the top of it; the others also have fainter cups. The view commanded from this site is stupendous, but the interesting thing about this site is that, from what we can gather from documentary evidence, there was at the centre of it some sort of slight mound, and possibly there had been a burial there. But the other curious thing about the Four-Poster is that it is not really a Northumberland thing at all, it belongs more to Scotland, they are far more extensively placed there. So here we have an extension of Scotland as it were, showing that national boundaries have no importance at all in archaeology, and in this remote part of Northumberland we have yet a whole series of cup marked stones.
Corbridge is known to most visitors for its Roman settlement south of Hadrian's wall. But interestingly, on the fourth century or third century, in complete Roman, well what looks like a set of shops in Roman times, there is a very, very large boulder with cup marks enclosed by a square groove with rounded corners. Most people don't even notice it, they walk past it, but it is really very dramatic, and when the sun catches it at certain times of the day, everyone of these cups and grooves shows up. Now, where this came from it's another one of these portables, we are not quite sure because the archaeological report was very vague. But we do know that the site of Coria, the Roman station, was previously occupied by Mesolithic people, as far back as perhaps 6000 BC, and that this large boulder, wherever it came from, it looks as if it's been beautifully rounded and beautifully made, must have come from some sort of ritual structure, probably of the Neolithic period.
Saint John Lee Church lies north across the River Tyne from Hexham. It's a fairly modern church on a very ancient site, and inside sandwiched between a font and a Roman altar, is a panel with prehistoric rock art. It's a very, very fine example of multiple concentric circles which are linked together with other designs. Now this was found by a lady who was walking a dog on the road that runs from Saint John Lee to Anick, it was under a lot of beautiful beech trees on a ridge. Now it has signs that signs that it was dragged out of the field by a tractor and chain, because the chain marks are still on it, and it lay on under these trees, how many years I don't know, until this lady spotted it. And the local church wardens of the church, after consulting me about it, decided that it would be a good idea to move it into a more protected place, and that is why it was brought in by forklift truck, and now sits in the corner of Saint John Lee Church. A very, very fine example except that during some trouble with the roof quite a lot of stuff dripped onto it from above, and it hasn't yet been cleaned up.
Prudhoe Castle is a Norman foundation, very spectacular, and I was called there one day during an excavation to have a look at a panel of rock art which had been found in the foundations of the hall. This was on the east side of the castle, east of the main tower. And when I had a look at this I could see straight away why they had called me: it's covered with cup and ring marks. Now clearly what had happened here was that this had been decorated outcrop, and the masons had been looking for stone to use for the building of the castle hall, and they cut it out. Now whether they recognised the design on it or not is impossible to say, and they certainly didn't intend it to be seen any further because it lay there ever since. What has been done with this now, we call it a portable of course because it must have been brought from somewhere else, is it has been erected outside the main entrance, where the visitors go in to the English Heritage site there. So again it's another one of these portables which is now being saved, and is being safeguarded.
