eyup yourself IM!

I spent a long time scratching my head over it too before giving up. I tried various things with the plan and maps and aerial photo’s of the area. I gave the plan a transparent background and overlayed in on the OS map hoping to get the features to match up and tried spinning it round and rescaling it but I couldn’t get a definitive match to leap out at me. Trying to think which landscape features would be important to the people at the time had me thinking that some of the carvings could represent lakes or even waterfalls but without knowing what each feature represented or what kind of scale the whole design is meant to cover it’s difficult. My guess is that if it is a map it would probably represent a distance that could be walked within a day or two at most which limits the number of landscape features and the scale but also makes me think there might be other similar carving in the area that haven’t been discovered yet. Also if we accept that the individual features carved on the rock are only roughly spatially right in relation to each other then its tempting to shift them around a bit to fit any number of different interpretations (which is what I did). Using a pick’n’mix approach with hills lakes and streams I could get most of the features to match up but eventually realised I had the whole thing back to front. I was looking at the map with Langdale to the left, Chapel Stile to the right with the rock in the middle and working from Stan’s plan – the carver stood at the rock would of course have those places the other way round – doh!

One thing that occurred to me was that if it was a local population (very probable) mining the axes then they may have wanted to keep the location to themselves, they wouldn’t have wanted any Tom, Dick or Oetzi coming along and helping themselves with the aid of a large signposted rock. The Langdale axes seem to have been seen as prestige items and must have had a high exchange value to the people mining them so would they have mined the blanks to be collected from here by traders (in which case some kind of map *would* be useful to people coming into the area) or were they transporting them themselves – they would be familiar with the local area and not need a map, which raises the possibility that the marks could represent parts of a ritual landscape instead rather than a physical one.

Anyway, I’m still with the map theory and I think you’ve hit on a great idea of walking the area without maps and drawing it out based on your own visual observations. I’m not that familiar with the area so I’ve had to stick with the maps and it’s difficult for me to figure out the exact lay of the land from above, so to speak. Some kind of 3D terrain plan might help but a ground based approach to drawing the area should give a very different perspective that might be more in line with the way the population would have chosen to represent the area. When you do it, it might be worth starting further east than Copt Howe to see if you can find anything that might correspond with the carvings on the left of the rock, for instance is the triangular patch of tiny pick marks meant to represent something or is it just decorative?

It sounds like an excellent idea for a weblog too :-)

-Chris