Cup & Ring Rock Carving in Northumberland

Lordenshaw

During a recent walk, organised by Brian and Irene Heron, we came across one of the mysterious cup and ring rock carvings at Lordenshaw. The setting was on a ridge south of Rothbury, that slopes to the River Coquet and rises south-west to the Simonside Hills. To the north-west overlooking the Coquet valley are the Cheviot Hills. The highest part of the ridge is occupied by a ditched Iron-Age enclosure later used as a Romano-British settlement. Much of the stone has been quarried away, leaving craters, but one large outcrop has survived although part of it has suffered from quarrying.

The sandstone rock has been carved with ‘cups and rings which are best seen when the sun is low in the sky. It is fairly evident that the rock carvings are old and standing there looking at the surrounding country you realise that these carvings are linked to the landscape and must have had a special meaning to the creators.

 The rock carvings we see today are a small sample of what was there originally. The destruction of rock carvings has been caused by land clearance, cattle, ploughing and quarrying. The carvings have a much longer lifespan than originally thought, starting as early as 3500BC and still in use during the early Bronze Age.

Many of the rock carvings are sited near, or actually incorporated into, cairns and burial mounds, thereby linking the symbols in some way with burial practices and possibly beliefs concerning ancestors and an afterlife.

The symbols are also found carved on standing stones and at stone circles, - places thought to have been used for religious and ritual purposes in the past.

Carvings often occur on outcrop rock where the site appears to have been specifically chosen so as to give uninterrupted views over the surrounding country.

The carvings were made using harder stone such as whinstone or andesite, probably with a mallet. Some incomplete carvings show a series of holes which were in the process of being joined up to form a ring. The carvings would have been very stark when first done as fresh cut rock contrasts greatly with the old rock.

Rock art was first discovered in Northumberland in the 1820s by John Langland and the cup and ring style is predominantly found in Northumberland with some fewer examples in Scotland and Ireland. Rock art is found in marginal areas which are more likely to have survived land clearance and cultivation. They are nearly always found near rivers with good views and the outcrops can be seen for considerable distances. Many sites are inter-visible across valleys – Weetwood and Fowberry across to Buttony, Chatton Park Hill, AmersideLaw Moor and Old Berwick for example.

The rock carvings were used in burials. Bodies were sometimes covered with stones (Cairns), a pit was dug and the bodies or cremations were placed inside. A Cist was created by constructing a chest of stones with a large slab on the top. Artefacts were sometimes included with the body or ashes – stone implements, weapons, pottery or jewellery.

In many cases small cup and ring carved stones were placed facing downwards in the burial and in at least one case a piece of carved rock was cut away from a large stone and a new carving was done. Presumably the cut away piece was used in a nearby burial.

There is a report from Canon Greenwell in 1850 when he wrote:-

“a considerable number of graves east of Ford Westfield House. 20 burials came to light. The bodies had been burnt, and their remains and charcoal were placed in circular hollows out of the natural (rock) and each covered with a stone. Two of these stones were marked on the underside, the one with the usual series of concentric circles, and the other with the rarer class of these markings, which consists of small hollows or pits”

From this report it looks like the carved stones were not cist covers but placed deliberately over the remains.

Many small carved rocks have come to light and some are to be found in museums and built into old bridges and walls. Cairns have these small carved rocks and they have also been found in cist burials. The problem is that so much damage has occurred to the historic sites that we have lost much archaeological evidence. No real excavation has been done until a couple of decades ago and any work previously done has missed vital clues. Only recently have the universities taken an interest in the rock art of Northumberland.

The Neolithic and early Bronze age people left a message for their immediate descendants and eventually for us, etched into the stones of Northumberland. For all our technological advancement we still cannot read their language, we can only guess at their purpose. We can say that the sites had a special significance in their religious practices – cup and ring carving is inextricably linked to burial sites. Placing artefacts in burials suggests they believed in some form of afterlife.

It is possible that the cup was used to hold cremated remains and represents the near stationary north star. The rings could represent the heavens in some form – some stars appear across the horizon (rising from the East in the northern hemisphere) while others perform circular patterns. Some cups are linked together and some have open ends – possibly a form of genealogical linkage. Some of the open ends of the rings point directly to the East as if the rising sun would light up the channel through the rings into the cup that held a sample of the cremated remains. We could imagine that the sunlight represented a kind of afterlife continuation. I would not be surprised to discover that some of the cup and ring open ends pointed directly towards a cairn on the highest eastern point to catch the suns rays at a particular time in the seasons. This is speculation of course and further research is essential.

I quote from Professor John North “The strongest arguments for the idea that the heavens occupied a central place in Neolithic and Bronze Age religion is the very scale of the architectural enterprises into which astronomical alignments were incorporated. This is not only a question of architectural scale, but of the attention given to geometrical and astronomical detail in the planning. Those responsible for these things must have been highly honoured members of society, if only by virtue of their ability to pronounce on the patterns of return of Sun and Moon to their extreme positions. Once the principle is accepted that key astronomical events could be accurately foreseen in this sense, then it seems probable – by a very broad analogy with almost every early literate culture known – that the events entered into religious explanations”

Why was there such an interest in the celestial sphere? Well I think Neolithic farming was beginning and the timing of the seasons took on greater importance from the days of hunter gathering. It was easier to travel by sea to establish new settlements as the land was covered in forests and navigation by stars was a possibility. Early man would have no concept of what we take for granted today. He would look at the night sky in wonder and amazement – a place of mystery, a place of afterlife and the opposite of the underworld where the sun, moon and stars disappeared every day. Our early ancestors used the sky as a practical tool, it gave them a sense of cyclic time, order and symmetry, and they would known the predictability of nature. The sky would be a metaphor, it would mean something important to them, it was both a symbol of the principles that they felt ordered their lives and the force behind those principles.

By Ronnie Teasdale

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