Latest Fieldnotes

Monday 24/6/02
After reading about the other markings on the Ancient Lothian website we find ourselves up here on a Monday afternoon. I’ve given Kat the GPS at the car park and let her follow a route to the waypoint. Turns out the co-ords for the main group of cup markings are a bit off, but I remembered where they were and took 4 sets of readings (with an accuracy of between 4 and 6 metres). As it turns out, the other cup marks are not that difficult to see- I dunno how I didn’t spot them the first time we came up here- guess I was just so chuffed at finding the main group after almost giving up hope.
Immediately to the east and up the hill from the main group are a group of 4 cup marks centred at NT2052874141. A large cup approx 15cm in diameter with the other three 7, 8 and 9 cm in diameter.
Down the slope (northwest) is a single cup (possibly two?) at NT2052374144. This has a diameter of approx 15cm.
To the southeast is another single cup at NT2052374136 with a diameter of approx 11cm.

Just across the road from St. Margaret’s church in Ilkley in an iron fenced enclosure are 3 cup and ring marked rocks know as the Panorama Stone. Originally the stone stood less than a mile away to the west around SE105470 but it was found to be ‘in the way’ of the development of 19th century Ilkley and was cut into 4 pieces, 3 of these being moved to their present positions in 1890 or 1892, depending on which account you read. Where the fourth part went I do not know.
Over the years the carvings on the rocks have badly deteriorated due to weather and vandalism and the marks shown in the web link are not easy to make out, but include cups with between 3 and 5 rings, some with connecting ladder motifs.

Strange site in a nice location. Mind the grassy slope up to the tomb – could be lethal in the wet.

It’s been a while since I visited the Pancake Rock, perched precariously on the edge of Green Crag Slack, and I had forgotten how steep the climb up the hillside from below the stone was – but what a reward – some outstanding views across Wharfedale. The last time I was here I climbed onto the rock to look at the cup marks, this time I was a little wary as a chap had been killed a few days before in this area in a rockfall. I didn’t fancy ending my days careering down a hillside on the back of 100 tons of rock surfboard.
Mindyou, it would have been a great way to go.....

A few days after a wrote the preceding fieldnotes I returned to Bradup after a space of 3 or 4 years. The boulders I had seen before were still there but this time the heather had been burned back, I knew these stone were not the circle, and that only one stone remained within an earth embankment. However the area of the field where Paul Kenyon said that the stone stood has recently been completely ploughed – there is no stone left. All I could find was a patch of roughly circular soil that was a slightly lighter colour than the surrounding land, and a pile of boulders at the field edge. These all showed deep gouge marks from the bucket of some kind of earth mover. Whether one of these stones is from the circle or not, I don’t know, but it looks like the sad end to yet another monument.
I hope I’m wrong.

In terms of location they don’t get much better than this. The walk down past the church is great and the views from the site are fantastic. Definitely a good place to hang out. On the way back from the monument it is worth checking the church grounds out – the sundial, as mentioned by Cope in TMA, and a couple of large boulders are of particular interest as is the church itself.

Despite the ruined state of this monument, it is well worth seeing. The setting is great sharing it’s view out to sea and the local mountains with the Clynnog Dolmen. When we visited the friendly farmer was watching his cows and proved to be an invaluable source of local information – tipping me off on one or two sites I’d overlooked.

Cefn Isaf sits in a field, which at the time of my visit was completely overgrown. The sun shone down and we chilled here for a while – Mrs IM commented that the site looks just like a Megalithic bus-stop. The capstone is huge as is the slab at the back of the chamber.

We started here, intending to take the path up to Ystumcegid. When we reached the concrete bridge between the two sites found that it was closed. It definitely wasn’t worth the risk, so we turned back – vowing to return to see Ystumcegid another day.

I was there today, lovely and peaceful. The uprooted tree still lies across part of the circle, caught in the branches of another. But at least the rhododendrons seem to have been killed off for good. One thing I have noticed here is that the birds (there are always a lot of pheasants around in the wood) do not seem to perch on the stones at all. They sit on the trees and branches, but not the stones – which are not streaked with the usual leavings either, so it doesn’t seem to be just when I’m watching them!

THE SISTERS

Also known as the Drift Stones, these 2 stones, 8ft and 9ft tall, stand 18 ft apart in a field to the NE of Boscawen-un stone circle and to the west of the Blind Fiddler. These stones are likely to have formed part of a ritual area centred around the stone circle and incorporating other monuments long since disappeared.

Taken from:

freespace.virgin.net/ancient.ways/landsend.htm

well after visiting boscawen un regularly now for several weeks(i live local , so its easy), i thought a visit at night seemed a good idea!, actually it was the night before the summer solstice sunrise!, well being a little apprehensive about possibly disturbing a working group of witches i headed for the circle, taking the easier route via the lay-by off the A30.What i can i say??, ive had some tremendous experiences at the circle in the daytime, but this ill never forget!!, walking down towards the circle in the dark(10pm ish), the whole of the circle was covered in a white dome!, obviously the energies were flowing!, i was suprised to see no-body there at all.... as i entered the circle, it was obvious there was huge enegies present, over the previous few days i’d noticed it building, even to the point of recieving electric shocks off the centre stone!.walking round i did my usual energy sensing using my hands, picking out the energy lines easilier than usual, it was a cloudy nite, very dark but the circle glowed!!, to be honest id say it was alive!, ever stuck a 9 volt batterie on your tongue as a child??, well that was the feeling i was experiecing throughout my body, the centre stone truly was vibrant!, to touch the stone was not needed , simply placing your hand near to the stone resulted in a strong “tingle”.standing there in front of it it seemed to grow and tower over myself, showing its true might ...the quartz stone always exudes strong energy in my opinion!, to sit against it usually results in an almost guaranteed altered state of conciousness for myself!, tonight was no exeption!, the whole circle being of absolute silence, i sat there for a while unerved by the fact i was in the middle of nowhere basically!!, i was then joined by another person, made me jump to be honest!, just appeared out of the dark!, seems he ‘s a regular to the many sites in the area and we shared discussion on various theories of the circle, i really would know how this circle is worked by the group(s) that use it, which i know it is used, so if you visit please be very respectful to everything!, thankyou!.. Anyway i carried on with my own little workings as did the other gentleman, whilst sat between the two stones at the entrance on the other side sensing the energy flow through the stones with my hands it suddenly appeared!, a white circle of light flowing as a ring through the stones themselves(obviously the one i was sensing at the time!, this really was when the whole circle came to life, with such vibrancy and strength, i really couldnt move at that moment in time, it was a nice energy though, eventually the gent left and i stayed till the early hours...meditating with the stones produces very interesting results i find, moreso if u actually meditate on the idea of actually bieng one of them sitting between them!!.well dawn broke, the sunrise was poor due to the very cloudy sky, but the overall feeling in the circle was one of absolute peace, the energy levels had resided considerably but i witnessed swirling cones of energy visibly around the centre stone and on the top of the stone by the far entrance!, this is truly beautiful to watch as it rises and twists about the stones!.i sat nearby to the centre stone for a while longer, this site truly fascinates me, more than any of the others, i think mainly due to the fact that its the most powerful!, i visit the others regular, but i never experience anything like i do here whilst there.well the rain came, and looking at my watch it was 6am!, a night i wont forget in a hurry!. people may dismiss such experiences, putting it down to drugs , alcohol etc.......but i partake in neither!, what i experience really does happen, im sure many will agree!, the energies at boscawen are strong and can get alot stronger!, its nice to sit and wallow in them at times, but theres a limit....sit and enjoy, secrets will be revealed to those who seek them, if you visit the site, please please be respectfull to everything about you!, boscawen is lucky in the respect that it can be a real bugger to find and it ensures it wont go the same way as the merry maidens!!, trampled into the ground almost!!. unlike the merry maidens, it is possible to spend time here without seeing anybody for hours!!, this is the way id like to see it kept!, im sure i have many in agreement too!.well visit i say!, the long route is nice too!, just remember to turn right at the farm ok....good shoes advisable!, if its raining your jeans will get a good soaking too!, and the brambles on either path will tear you to shreds if you wear shorts!!, ive the scars to prove ok!!.

With reference to the “cup-marks”. The jury came back with a verdict of....natural weathering.

Definitely NOT the easiest place to find, but as someone says below, getting there shows you wanted to find it. I thought the sign below the NT arrow ‘Coldrum Barrow’ very fitting – it simply says ‘DEAD SLOW’. Someone at the National Trust obviously has a sense of humour!
Perched up on its little plateau overlooking fields gives you the feeling that someone wanted this place to be special with a view so those who have gone before could look down over the land they knew. It’s a very quiet, peaceful place. They’ve tried to get rid of the red sprayed garaffitti and done a fair job. Why do people want to do this sort of thing in the first place? Beats me. On one of the silhouette pics I’ve uploaded here I got a strong sense of the ‘male’ female’ shapes of stones as found at Avebury. Or is it just a play of the light.
Well worth hunting for and spending some time with – especially as we’re not exactely inundated with barrows and stones down here in Kent.

I think Furry Dan and I must have just missed each other at Machrie Moor last September.

I was on honeymoon there, and visited on 17.09.01, a beautifully hot day. We had abandoned a visit to it a couple of days before in the rain, and I agree that you would need wellies to negotiate the boggy path if it has been raining recently.

It really is a special place, and it’s worth hanging around so that you can have it to yourself for a while. The views of the surrounding mountains are fantastic. Even though it is near the road, you can’t see it from the stones (or vice versa) and you feel quite cut off from modern life

I will try to scan in some photos that we took, we used up nearly a whole film so be warned! black and white pictures came out really well.

We travelled on the 324 bus from Blackwaterfoot, the driver knew exactly which spot to drop us at. It was then a 10 min walk across the fields to the stones. This is thus not an accessible spot for those with mobility problems, but worth the walk for those that don’t have that restriction.

Afterwards we walked north along the main road for approximately 1 mile, and had tea and cakes at the Machrie Golf Course tea rooms – a church hall type place, rather than the posh club house we’d expected, they weren’t bothered by our muddy boots. We then flagged down the bus back to Blackwaterfoot. Buses run approximately every 2 hours.

Cornwall, last summer (2001)

Visited several sites during a magical holiday. Men-An-Tol was second or third that we visited in a compressed area littered with with megalithic structures. I think they had to plant stones because trees are few and far between in Cornwall.

At each site we visited we sacrificed jelly babies. Men-An-Tol was the site of one of our most barbarous executions.... A funeral pyre for a yellow jelly baby! Then we were off, tramping through the gorse to some iron age hill fort and a stone mushroom who’s name escapes me just at present.

And the sun was shining.

The grid reference given here is only a rough guide as it is several years since I visited the stone and I don’t remember where I heard about it, it certainly isn’t marked on the OS map. Use the map to find the road that runs south of The Chevin (I think the road is also known as The Chevin). Park in the pub west of the Chevin Lodge Hotel and follow a footpath behind the pub and head south. Pass through a gate and turn left then continue south alongside a drystone wall. At some point further along you will see the six foot high highly weathered Bull Stone on the other side of this wall.

I never managed to find the elusive Bradup circle. At the time I visited it a few years ago the area where I thought it was was covered with a thick carpet of heather. Rooting around in this heather I uncovered several large boulders, some of the 12 remainig stones that my guide book told me remained of an original 18 – aha! I had found it.
Unfortunately these stone were not part of the circle, I had made the same mistake that Paul Kenyon first made when he visited, but at least he found the correct location of the site and the one remaining stone. Check his website for more information.

Nursing the mother of all hangovers and with a heavy heart from a broken relationship I decided to give Hetty a visit.
I’d never been there before so felt a fresh new place to move onto. Hetty looked beautiful today: covered in waves of wild flowers and grasses, there were even wild orchids. As I went into her depths i realised i had something in my coat pocket. It was a love letter from him, stuffed there from another time. I read it by the light of my candle, snug in Hetty’s chamber. The smell of him was overwhelming and his words made me remember how sweet and loving he could be. I cried my heart out, i just couldn’t stop. Then suddenly I sensed someone there, but could not see or here anyone. A warm feeling came over me and I felt comforted, things are gona be alright. I went out from her warm dark depths, out into the light, refreshed , ready to go on and move on. Thanks Hetty.

As Julian says this must have been an important place once – the name, the views, the Roman road and both the Beacon and Argham cursus aligned on it. Sadly this fact doesn’t seem to be recognised by the farmer who owns the land as he/she is steadily ploughing away the summit of the beacon.

After the disappointment of Rudston Beacon, Southside Mount is a real joy. Although badly ploughed over the years it is still an instantly recognisable barrow. It would be an ideal place to while away some time on a sunny summers day – there are some great views – however when I visited it, it was grey and raining and the trudge across the field (mind the pea crop!) certainly christened my new pair of baseball boots. Despite being soaked in rain and covered with mud I returned to the car with a broad smile and glad heart. Southside Mount – what a place :-)

The name of the town of Staines means “stones” and it is thought to come from a group of nine stones mentioned in a twelfth century charter of Chertsey Abbey which delineated the boundaries of the Abbey lands, and was reported in Up Pontes by Christine Lake. The charter says this:

“Down to that Eyre that stands in the Thames at Lodders Lake and so along Thames by mid-stream to Glenthuthe (Glanty: M25 roundabout), from Glenhuthe by mid-stream along Thames to the Huthe (Hythe) before Negen Stones”. (“Negen stanes” is Saxon for “nine stones”).

If this was a prehistoric stone circle, it is the only one known in the south-east of England; the nearest today is the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire. And when we look at the site which seems to be indicated, now occupied by a roundabout on the Egham side of Staines Bridge, there is a definite convergence of ways, and each of them seems to mark a ley; though, curiously, the ways do not meet at a single point but rather skirt a small area.

The most striking alignment is that of the Roman road coming from London to Staines, now the A30 and Staines High Street; the alignment goes through the proposed site, although the Roman road diverges from it slightly to cross the river downstream of the present bridge.

The Egham Causeway is another of the alignments converging on the proposed site of the stones; a ley which passes through a Neolithic and Bronze Age site by Runnymede motorway bridge.

The third alignment is the one running up Thorpe Road, Egham Hythe, close to St. Paul’s Church there which is visible from the Negen Stones site.

When aligning the site with St. Mary’s Church, Staines, the line is also found to go south through St. Peter’s Church Chertstey, from where another ley was followed some years ago. Going north, it skirts the fort at Gerrards Cross and continues through the church St. Michael and All Angels and nearby Sycamore Corner cross-roads at Amersham-on-the-Hill. St. Mary’s Church is 19th century but is on the site of a stone church built by St. Erminildis in 675, on a pronounced rise in the ground. It also has a tradition of stones at the site, and this has been linked with the Negen Stones charter in the Staines Town Trail, but this is unlikely to be the site of these stones as it is not near The Hythe, which is a riverside road, presumably originally a wharf, on the Egham Hythe side of the river. However, it could be another site of stones.

The site of the Neolithic causewayed enclosure mentioned in Prehistoric London by Nick Merriman is now Junction 13 of the M25, although there is a picture of the cropmarks in that book. It was excavated in 1961-63 and was found to have had inner banks which had been ploughed flat. Pottery of the type found at Windmill Hill in Wiltshire was found there.

When aligned through the Negen Stones site this alignment was found to pass through Weybridge Church, nineteenth century but the site of an older church.

Penshaw Hill seems to be one of those fantastic hill forts completely missed by historians because of a later addition – A mock greek temple. Penshaw appears to be one of the few classic triple rampart Iron Age hill forts known to exist in the north. In terms of magic, it has a similar feel to Almondbury, with dates from the Bronze Age to the mid Iron Age. To add to its mystique, an apparent saucer barrow sits unnoticed at the foot of the hill, within the outer enclosure.
In 1844, before most antiquaries were interested in local pre-history worm hill, the regions greatest hill fort was ‘converted’ into a folly in the form of a Greek temple, to John George Lambton, first Earl of Durham (1792 – 1840). Governor – General of Canada, Grand Master of the Order of Freemasons, Member of Parliament, one time Lord Privy Seal, landowner and coal owner. Erected in 1844 by private subscription, its design by the Greens of Newcastle was executed by Thomas Pratt of Sunderland. The monument comprises Greek Doric columns (4 by 7) with entabulatures and end pediments but no roof. The columns stand upon a solid stone platform.
As a consequence, all the earthworks associated with the hill were assumed to be related to the monument and little attention was paid to the significance of this ancient site. Even the OS map of 1864, published twenty years after the erection of the monument, notes the earthworks simply as ‘old quaries‘

The area marked as Painshaw Hill Quarry has indeed been fully quarried out, however a crop mark to the West may still elude to the orginal outer bank of this enormous hill fort – one of the largest hill fort in the north yet totally unrecorded.
The photo’s show the earthworks and an additional feature – a possible Barrow.
For full details visit my website

8/6/02

We walked from the village car park, over the disused railway bridge over the Dochart and then into the estate. We got permission at the house and cautiously walked passed the cows and calves.

The sun was hot but the field the ground was heavy as it had been raining heavily the previous day.

What a place though. It’s such a well preserved, compact little circle. The River, just a few hundred yards to the west of the circle, flows northwards towards Loch Tay.

I sat down in the middle of the circle and heard kids playing by the house, the peacock and a chainsaw up in the woods above the field with the rocky, Sron a Chlachain looking down from the west.

A great place to chill. I’d had an absolute bastard of a journey down to Derbyshire. First I was fined for speeding (for the first time ever) and then involved in an accident with two other cars (not my fault!). I visited the bull ring after the accident, and was brought down even further by the disgusting way the monument is treated. By the time I arrived at barbrook I just wasn’t in the mood but my bad mood soon lifted as i took in the various sites on the moor. The circle seems to be a victim of it’s own accessibility – the cup marks in one of the stones were filled with coins which have left black marks.

Little Meg, at the time of this visit, lay in very tall grass making the stones barely visible until I was right beside them. It had been raining all afternoon so the stones gleamed like polished gems in the lush green grass.

Earlier in the day I had visited the museum in Penrith to see the Stone Circle exhibition (runs until September 2002). On display was a small carved stone taken from Little Meg.