>Bradford council (off the top of my head) have published a pdf list of the stones >around there...

Have they? I'll have to take a look at that. Is it on the Bradford Council site?

>I'm starting to think the best carved stones are in Ireland - it's just those pictures.

Irish rock art is wonderful.... those decorated tombs are stunning! Irish RA certainly seems to use a wide vocabulary of symbols that don't figure in British RA... perhaps a different tradition or dialect of RA than the British panels, which seem to work more around variations of theme such as cups n' rings... of course there's always exceptions.

In Scottish and Northumbrian/Cumbrian RA, cups with multiple rings are quite common, whereas they are rare in Yorkshire, which tends to favour grooves enclosing groups of cups or forming a more abstract design. It is rare to find cups with more than a single ring... there are notable exceptions, but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

I love it all to be honest and couldn't say that one tradition is better than another... obviously, coming from Yorkshire I have a slight bias to Yorkshire RA, and I'm constantly delighted by the amount of invention in British rock art as a whole.