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In the name of relaxation, would you like a small cup-and-ring marked stone to be gently rubbed back and forth against your jowls like this gentleman?

Now you can thanks to strong smelling toiletry-mungers Lush.

Because at many of their branches you can get the Highland Spa experience.

Who could walk past the enticing display in their shop windows? An alluring mixture of astroturf, some cardboard boxes, scrunched up grey paper and small stones with esoteric carvings on them. Catnip for the urban prehistorian.

What is that I see? Cup-and-ring marks. Spirals. What might be a wheel of cheese and a green bag o stuff.

Barely able to contain excitement, one begins to search online to find the secret of these stones, as going into the Lush shop itself would be too odorific.

The small pebbles are a key part of what Lush are calling a Scotland-themed spa treatment

What do you get for your £150? (??!?)

An hour long “full body hot stone massage” that features “Highlands spring water, stones carved with ancient Scottish symbols and … choreographed to a soundtrack of Gaelic historical folk songs re-recorded especially for the treatment.”

So the cup-and-ring marked symbol stones are ‘ancient Scottish symbols’ which is not quite right, but this is a spa experience, not the National Museum of Scotland.

What part do these little pebbles play in the spa process? “The experience begins with a Scottish stone consultation using 250 million year old Scottish marble, carved with ancient symbols which correspond to various different states of mind. Choose ’the river’ to ebb and flow with life’s twists and turns, ‘simplicity’ to help focus on what matters, or ‘the rainbow’ to embrace hope and joy.”

A Scottish stone consultation.

I am not sure what meaning is ascribed to the prehistoric symbols on these stones, but I suppose it is no less unlikely than any of the other 108 theories that have been used to explain cup-and-ring marks according to Ronald Morris. Online I have found reference to symbols that mean ‘The Eye, The Village, and The Journey’ (source), The Rainbow (source) or ‘Community’ (source).

After this, you are likely to be asked to disrobe (‘Modesty Level 3’) and then have hot basalt stones laid on your back, which sounds to me the very opposite of relaxing. Gaelic music drowns out the screams of pain.

To finish: “The treatment ends with a warming Scottish tea infused with heather, leaving the client feeling comforted and relaxed.”

There is something weirdly occult about the ways that these prehistoric symbols are used in this rite, sorry, treatment. This is a “Unique stone consultation, inspired by tarot readings to reconnect and restore inner wellbeing” (source). Which sort of fits in with one strand of New Age practice where prehistoric and ‘Celtic’ and Gaelic stuff are entangled and millennia squashed together. Prehistory and linguistics set in stone. One reviewer noted that the experience ‘Spiritually Connected Me to My Celtic Roots’ and there is a general sense that the symbols stone selection process is one that has a spiritual, even religious dimension.

What does this spa treatment, its marketing, and the use of prehistoric symbols tell us? The generic ‘Highlandness’ of these symbols is wrongheaded of course, with similar motifs found across much of western Britain and not restricted to uplands never mind high lands. Gordon Barclay has convincingly argued that early conceptions of the Scottish Neolithic (from whence some of these symbols came) was very much assumed to be Highland in character, so it could be argued that the pitching of this hot spa experience is merely repeating a tired old trope about ‘ancient’ (and historic) Scotland.

But then where is the harm? This seems to be a pleasurable experience for those who like to do this kind of thing, and as noted already, if a cup-and-ring marked symbol is regarded as meaning, say, community, then that might not be too far from the prehistoric reality. But the curmudgeon in me would like users to be imparted with at least some contextual information about the origins of this type of symbol, extracting it from an esoteric Highland wooliness that leaves me uncomfortable.

Now, if they were not stones, but made of chocolate, I might have been more understanding….

Acknowledgements: thanks to Eddie Stewart for spotting the Glasgow Lush display, shown in the photos above not attributed to Lush.

See Barclay, G. 2004. ‘ “Four Nations Prehistory”: Cores and Archetypes in the Writing of Prehistory’. In Brocklehurst, H. and R. Phillips, eds. History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain, 151–159. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

One of the most remarkable episodes in British archaeology was played out in the summer of 1937 in Clydebank, near Glasgow. For a short while, the Druid Temple, or Knappers, was the hottest ticket in town and prehistory was sexy, thanks to the charismatic Ludovic MacLellan Mann. This site, long invisible, and in the shadow of Clydebank tower blocks, is one of my favourites.

Over the years, thanks to the kindness of various folk, I have come to own a modest amount of what might be termed Ludovic Mann archive material. This is all in the process of being catalogued and written up, and in due course will be donated to one of his more established archives. These are held by HES in Edinburgh, and Glasgow Life. Some of this pertains to the Knappers excavations, and in this blog post I would like to share some of this material, and contextualise it.

This site was excavated in advance of sand and gravel quarrying from 1933 until 1939, initially under the direction of JM Davidson. Excavations were in 1937 taken on by eccentric Glasgow archaeologist and antiquary, Ludovic Mann. I have blogged about him many times before, to the extent he has his own category! In that summer, he promoted this site so effectively that by all accounts thousands visited the excavations, and he gave talks on site and in the evenings. The site also became transformed with curious replications of mounds and stake structures, although it would be fair to say that what he thought he found, and the reality, were not the same thing. It was, however, clearly a significant Neolithic and Bronze Age site with burials. You can read more about the results of excavations at this site in Graham Ritchie and Helen Adamson’s later account (1983) and find out more about Mann’s antics in Ritchie’s biography of Mann (2003).

There are additional references and links at the end of this post for you to follow up on the Knappers story and Mann himself. And to contextualise this somewhat, you may want to watch a lecture I gave back in 2018 where I considered what Ludovic Mann was up to in Clydebank in 1937! Knappers was only one of the eccentric things he got up to….

In this post I want to look at two categories of material that I have copies of, both of which were part of his campaign of publicity and fund-raising. These are a series of pamphlets or booklets, and postcards. I will also mentioned newspaper articles briefly, but this will be the subject of a more in-depth piece of writing to come in the future.

Booklets

Mann was a great self-publicist, and as well as his public appearances and experimental reconstructions at the site itself, he also produced a series of pamphlets that were, in effect, attempts to get publicity for the site, and try to raise money to purchase the site ‘for the nation’. He never did achieve the latter aspiration but there is no doubt that his pamphlets did much to promote what he called the Druid (or Druids) Temple, bringing visitors to the site, and putting into print some of his theories to explain the site. These were also illustrated with plans and artefact photos, and so are immensely useful documents.

There were three booklets and I have copies of all of these (multiple copies in some cases)! All were in effect self-published by Mann.

An appeal to the nation is the earliest of these booklets, and this is very much about raising funds to the extent that each copy included a donations slip and envelope for the “DRUIDS” TEMPLE, near GLASGOW RESTORATION FUND APPEAL.

NB 166 Buchanan Street is between Queen Street Station and Dundas Lane, and until recently played host to Forbidden Planet.

The short pamphlet (15 pages) includes a brief summary of the key results of the excavations to date, and extracts from newspaper pieces about the excavations (The Times 15th September 1937 and The Glasgow Herald 28th July 1937). There are two fold-out diagrams which document fanciful cosmological interpretations for the site.

The urgency of this fund raising is made clear on the title page and throughout the pamphlet. At the end, there is some sense of what the money will be used for: “to continue the exploration work and to reconstruct the temple and restore the prehistoric setting, which fortunately has not yet been interfered with by modern buildings. Thereafter the site will, it is hoped, be handed over to the perpetual control and for the delectation of posterity to a special body composed of representatives of learned Societies and local Councils and Trusts”.

Finally, and tantalisingly, Mann ends: Large scale diagrams for Schools, Exhibitions and Lectures may be obtained. I guess something like this?

An appeal came out in autumn 1937 I presume, and was probably closely followed by a second booklet, or rather he re-named the original and gave it a grey cover.

The “Druids'” Temple near Glasgow had gained an apostrophe since the first version, but in fact, upon opening, it becomes clear that this is basically the same as the ‘Appeal’ booklet but less obviously about the money. No donation slip was contained in this version.

This early, and very brief, text was subsequently supplemented by a longer booklet that had multiple editions, the version in my collection dated to 1939.

The Druid Temple Explained has a title that suggests that things have moved on, and the potential recognised by Mann in earlier writings had by now come to fruition, and he had a better handle on what had been found. However there is still an appeal in the front inside cover for donations to be sent to Eric Ferguson.

The text consists of a series of short essays on Knappers themes: the significance of prehistoric monuments in general; discovery and excavation of the site; description of results and small finds; what they mean; and some broader contextualisation. Mann’s obsessions with eclipses and prehistoric measurements come to the fore.

The success of earlier publicity of the site is suggested by Mann’s remarkable claim that ‘some 40,000 people visited the place in 1938’ (page 5), with no figures given for the clearly very busy 1937 season.

Notably this booklet contains black and white plates of artefacts found during the excavations, notably a ‘polished flint chisel’ (actually an adze) and a fish-shaped ‘stone axe blade’, plus two views of a complete pot. Three of these images were also used as postcards (see below). A site plan was also included, and a wonderful drawing of a Food Vessel pot. This was drawn by Mann himself, and contains an insightful observation about the decoration looking like ‘cereal berries and ears’; as I have said before, this was very much ahead of its time.

This latter booklet was very kindly posted to me in 2017 after a public lecture I gave about Mann’s work at the Cochno Stone – Miss Fleming (who also spoke to me after the lecture) told me this booklet was handed to her father personally by Mann when he visited Knappers in 1939. Shivers down the spine time!

Postcards

Amongst the stuff I have in my modest Mann archive is a small white envelope containing four postcards. I have to confess I can’t remember where I got this from, but all four have images from the Knappers excavations, and I would imagine were sold on site to raise funds.

The envelope has written on it: COCHNO?? DRUID TEMPLE PHOTOS. 18 AUGUST 2018. ‘DOING A WEE TIDY’ suggesting these were found items in someone’s house or study. [If you gave these to me, please do let me know!]

Three of the postcards show objects found during the excavations, and each has a short descriptor on the back too, stuck rather than printed onto the card. Each of these items was also pictured in the 1939 The Druid Temple Explained booklet although in sepia-colour, not the black and white of that publication. One postcard shows three items, the others one each (only the fish-shaped ‘flint chisel’, far left, did not get its own postcard, or at least I don’t have this).

Two of these objects were illustrated in Ritchie and Adamson’s 1983 reconsideration of Knappers.

The ‘Knappers Pot’ is a fine item, and an incredibly rare example of a complete Neolithic pottery bowl. For scale, it is 10cm high.

Bowl, complete but broken and badly repaired so that the irregularity of its form has been
exaggerated. The fabric is hard, mainly black shading in places to buff with a semi-burnished slip outside; the surfaces are uneven and in places are broken by quite large protruding grits; tool marks remain on the upper surface of the rim, on the internal surface, and in places forming a groove below the rim outside. No section of the fabric is visible. One perforation has been made from the outside (Audrey Henshall in Ritchie & Adamson 1983, 184).

We would now call this pot a Carinated Bowl (not Western tradition or Grimston-Lyle as in the past) and it belongs to the fourth millennium cal BC, being the earliest form of pottery in Britain. The perforation suggests it may have been hung or had some kind of lid. There are only a couple of other complete examples known from Scotland, notably a fine bowl found in the ditch of a Neolithic hill top enclosure at Dun Knock, Perth and Kinross.

This object, Mann’s flint chisel, is in fact part of a late Neolithic adze, described by JB Kenworthy in great detail. Assigned to the Duggleby type, this was likely a digging tool that would have been hafted with a wooden handle. He adds, ‘it may be considered as being socially prestigious rather than of ‘everyday’ significance’ (in Adamson & Ritchie 1983, 189).

The fourth postcard was different, showing a view of the site in its entirety. This was probably taken in 1937. There is no label or writing on the back of this postcard, but it does have written on the front in shaky white capitals (Mann’s own hand?), “DRUID” TEMPLE, CLYDEBANK.

This image can also be found on Trove, as part of the digital archive for this site (link) and I have included their copyright statement below the postcard although the postcard I have was not courtesy of HES. This striking image shows in spectacular detail just how elaborate the reconstruction and replica elements of this site were. Bear in mind this was in the middle of a sand quarry so all of the earthworks and stakes are speculative additions to the site by Mann and his team. This represents a hugely eccentric visitor attraction, but probably does not bear much similarity to what this place would have looked like in prehistory.

Final words

The booklets and postcards offer an amazing insight into what was essentially a very short window into the life of Knappers aka the Druid Temple (with or without plural, with or without apostrophe). They show that extensive efforts were being made to market the excavations as a visitor attraction, primarily to raise funds, through the sale of postcards and pamphlets. This was to fund excavations but also promote the long term survival of the site as a visitor attraction. In other words, an early example of heritage crowdfunding. This was supported by marketing materials such as the map and flyer below, and the magnetic presence of Mann himself on site holding forth.

Another important element to the story of the promotion of this site was newspaper coverage. Mann used the media extensively to promote his work and even report on excavation results, and his work at Knappers resulted in a blizzard of newspaper coverage.

This short extract, from the Edinburgh Evening News 28th July 1938, contains a typical Mann inspired clickbait headline. I have come into possession for research purposes a scrapbook compiled by Mann’s assistant, George Applebey, of scores of newspaper and magazine clippings that follow the Knappers excavations from 16th July through to 16th August 1938. I am currently working on a paper that pulls together the information from this treasure trove, which shed light on the excavation process and the marketing of this site, so watch this space for more Mann archive richness!

The value of such material cannot be downplayed. As well as offering insight into archaeological discoveries and informing interpretations of these, documents such as news clippings, photos, notebooks, leaflets and pamphlets help to explore the context within which discoveries were made. This can also tell us something about society at the time, the personalities involved, and cast light on the archaeological process. This kind of thing has become an increasingly important and exciting area of my research in the last few years, working on archives of the likes of Mann, Ronald Morris, Alexander Thom and Harry Bell. So there is more where this came from!

Sources and acknowledgements: none of this could have happened without the kindness of others who have shared materials with me, or passed them into my care, for which I am hugely grateful. The Applebey scrapbook was given to me by George Applebey’s son, also George. The Druid Temple Explained booklet was posted to me by a Miss Fleming, and the “Druids'” Temple near Glasgow booklet came from the personal collection of Margaret & Louis MacInally. None of this is taken for granted, and all materials will be passed to an appropriate repository at the conclusion of my research, with appropriate acknowledgements.

Thanks to staff at the HES search room, and Katinka Dalglish at Glasgow Life, for access to their Mann collections.

Further reading: both PSAS papers can easily be found online.

Ritchie, J. N. G. and H. Adamson (1982), ‘Knappers, Dunbartonshire: a reassessment’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 111: 172–204.

Ritchie, J. N. G. (2003), ‘Ludovic McLellan Mann (1869–1955): ‘the eminent archaeologist’’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 132: 43–64.

Finally, the Duggleby adze image comes from: Mortimer, J.R. 1905. Forty Years Researches in British and Saxon Burial Mounds of East Yorkshire. London: Brown.

For more on this amazing site, see: Gibson, A. 2011. Report on the excavation at Duggleby Howe causewayed enclosure…. Archaeological Journal. 168, 1-63.

I grew up in a town called Larkhall in South Lanarkshire, not far from Glasgow. It would be fair to say that this is a place that has a negative reputation at least in west central Scotland, and I was very aware of this when I was growing up. However the character of the town has changed quite a lot since my school days ended there in 1991, with a good deal of suburban expansion around the edges, catalysed I would imagine by the re-opening of the railway line, and two stations, in the town in 2005. There is now a thriving main street with lots of independent shops, which stands in contrast with the miserable centre of larger neighbouring town Hamilton.

Anyway, you do not read this blog to find out about the recent history of Lanarkshire towns. The reason that I am focusing on Larkhall here is because over the past decade or so development near the town centre has revealed a good deal of prehistoric traces that suggest at the very least low levels of settlement from the early Mesolithic through to the Iron Age. These discoveries, while not really being widely known locally, were made during a a series of evaluations and excavations in advance of several key developments: the construction of a new secondary school (Larkhall Academy) and two retail developments with associated car parks: Asda and Home Bargains / Iceland. Such development-led archaeology is a machine for finding urban prehistory in unexpected – but yet totally predictable – places.

Over the past couple of years I have given three talks in Larkhall about the town’s low key prehistory, two in St Machan’s Church, and one (in a very cold town centre venue) to the Larkhall Heritage Group. These brought me back to my roots, and even although I visit my parents regularly in the town, this deep time dive took on something of the character of an investigation into my own prehistory. I reflected on my own engagements with the places that prehistoric stuff would be found in the future when I was a school kid who did not even for a moment imagine that I would end up becoming an archaeologist. This has placed me in a complex temporal entanglement with this place, these places.

A football pitch that I once played on (and it was literally once as I was never picked again) in a place that was once a Neolithic pit cluster site. Paths I used to haunt heading down to the viaduct (the highest in Scotland when in use) or Millheugh, cutting across roundhouse and ditch locations that no-one knew were there. Emergent prehistory only after the event. Future prehistory. The past in the present. As archaeologist Laurent Olivier has written, “the physical environment of the present is essentially made up of the things of the past” (2004, 205) although this was unappreciated by my 13-year-old self.

I recently completed the manuscript for a book called Urban Deep Time: the Contemporary Archaeology of Prehistory (Bloomsbury, 2026) and as part of my word-cutting final edit, I removed a personal case-study of Larkhall from the final chapter. The rest of this post is an adapted version of this text.

Before Larkhall

As a schoolchild in the 1980s I attended Larkhall Academy, a secondary school in a small post-industrial, post-weaving South Lanarkshire. The school at that time (it has since been replaced by a new campus) consisted of two ugly bricks of black panels and windows and assorted ‘temporary’ ancillary structures.

As a relatively solitary teenager (see photo below for evidence of this), I often sought solace in the music department, but from time to time was convinced by sadistic PE teachers to partake in physical sports such as cross-country running in the rough moorlands surrounding the school on the fringes of the town and school campus. Walking back and forth to school, I passed between a leisure centre and playing fields, and every day I passed through a castle gateway folly with fake gun loops.

My personal geography as a 15-year-old was fairly restricted spatially, and even more so in terms of time-depth. It is probably not fair to blame me at the time for giving no thought to what might lie beneath my feet as I trudged or wheezed across the barren landscape of my teenage huff, all sickly grass and tarmac.

In other words, exactly the kind of place where one would not expect there to have been a prehistoric legacy, a standard central belt town in Scotland. Yet over the past two decades, this perception has had to change – because of development. The landscape of my school experiences is now transformed, with the new school, retail parks, a network of tarmac footpaths, and housing developments. Together these represent a series of transactional non-places that could be anywhere in Britain, but what was found when these developments were being planned and prepared makes this place special. My horizons now expanded, revisiting my walks to and from school is now an exercise in unpeeling layers in time and memory.

Pre-school

This was first brought home to me when I found out about the discovery and excavation of a Neolithic pit cluster, probably a settlement site, in advance of the construction of the new Larkhall Academy in 2005/2006.

Located to the east of the old school, the footprint of the new school building spanned grass that I frequently walked across, and that football pitch I once played on. Evaluation undertaken by Headland Archaeology in 2005 found a ditch and pits, some of which contained prehistoric pottery. The following summer an open area excavation took place, revealing the full extent of this site, and recovering a wonderful assemblage of early Neolithic Carinated Bowl pottery. The excavators argued this cluster of nine postholes and eight pits were indicative of Neolithic settlement in the vicinity, albeit none of the features were part of a structure, However, a single piece of daub hinted at some form of wall or windbreak, and the remains of hearth sweepings were found in one pit.

This bog-standard development-led discovery was for me magical, because of my own personal connection to this place. Here, twenty years after I first walked over this strip of land on the way to my new secondary school, archaeologists carefully recovered an incredible ceramic assemblage. Well over 100 sherds of Carinated Bowl were found, with an exceptionally thin fabric (indicating great skill on the part of whoever made them, as at-the-time National Museum of Scotland curator Alison Sheridan told me) with hints of plant and grain impressions on the expressive abraded surfaces. Moreover, the initial observation that hazelnuts had been consumed here was augmented by post-excavation analysis which showed evidence for the farming of oats and barley here, but not wheat, typical of many fourth millennium sites in Scotland (see Bishop et al. 2010, 77). All this half a metre beneath where my feet, where I walked, unaware of the thin temporal ice I was skating on.  This discovery was matched by a collection of cut features and a stone-lined hearth found during excavations nearby in 2011-2012 by CFA Archaeology Ltd. in advance of the construction of an Asda supermarket. Some of these features also contained sherds of Carinated Bowl pottery suggesting several phases of activity – and probably settlement – here in the fourth millennium BCE.

Where hunters gathered

Taking the story of this place back to over five millennia ago would have blown the mind of me, the teenager, but still earlier traces remain in the place we now call Larkhall. The 2005 evaluation of the Larkhall Academy site recovered a small assemblage of Mesolithic lithics. The broader settlement context of this was identified a few years later when evaluation and excavation took place a few hundred metres away in advance of the construction of small retail park consisting of a Home Bargains, Iceland, and associated car park. Located on a promontory, this site – known as Nairn Street – was excavated in 2014 and 2015 by GUARD Archaeology Ltd.

A wide range of cut features were found, including four structures, three of which belonged to later prehistory. But one of them was Mesolithic, Structure 1, which consisted of a 5m diameter arc-shaped setting of seven postholes, and other postholes may have belonged to the other side of this small timber building.

The postholes produced evidence for burning in the vicinity, perhaps in hearths, and one radiocarbon date, from a fragment of alder, was produced, dated to 8203–7793 cal BC (SUERC-62280). There was not much else to hint at what this ancient place was used for, and a lack of the lithics one would normally associate with such a site, but it likely “reflected temporary or transient habitation in early prehistory” (Mooney 2023, 10). This place, where hunters gathered amidst mixed woodland some 10,000 years ago, is now a car park.

Home Bargains homes

The presence of Mesolithic and Neolithic features and material culture found in advance of the construction of car parks, a school and a supermarket, should not be taken as evidence of continual occupation of this place. Rather, it probably represents the normal churn of earlier prehistoric settlement patterns, largely mobile, and so we should imagine that there were periods of many centuries where no-one was living here, and the hollowed-out traces of what went before got lost in the long grass. Things changed somewhat later in prehistory, as evidenced by the other three structures found at the Home Bargains / Iceland retail park, all dating to many thousands of years later but suggesting less transient settlement rhythms.

Structure 3, of which the Nairn Street excavation report notes would have been, “typical of roundhouses constructed and used during the middle Bronze Age in the region” (Mooney 2023, 39), might be described in other ways, given that is merely a clinical archaeological explanation and name for what were once homes. This roundhouse was built and in use in the middle of the second millennium BC. This was indeed a place to live, with evidence found for cereal processing, food storage and the working of shale objects. Structural problems were adjusted with home improvements, a nice connection to the homeware shop now built a few metres from where it once stood. At the end of its life, this house burnt down, perhaps accidentally.

And so it continues, with hints at Iron Age activity across all of these sites, including ceramics found at Larkhall Academy and a wooden structure that was constructed on the remnants of structure 3, partially destroying its remains. This latter building, dating to the centuries around the year 0, contained evidence for large deposits of dung and may have been a byre or shepherd’s hut. Layers upon layers, jumbles of human stories and lives, reworked again and again. Campsite, workplace, home, field, shieling hut, car park, school, shop. This is not a continuous thread, but there is a suggestion that some inhabitants of this place uncovered something left from before, a keepsake, a curio, an archaeological artefact.

So what?

A question I get asked surprisingly commonly in my archaeological endeavours is ‘so what?’. The taxpayer and several developers had to pay good money to get these archaeological features and finds investigated in order for their building projects to commence. And to be honest, as things stand, all that money has achieved is some nice boxes of stuff in museums and some dry excavation reports that can be downloaded.

There is a very nice conglomeration of evidence here that indicated human domestic everyday life for a period of several thousand years, on and off, long before Larkhall. Yet as far as I can tell, these discoveries have so far had little impact on the community. If the reception of the talks I have done is anything to go by, awareness of these discoveries is very low in the town. I spoke to teachers at my old school during a visit to a careers event in 2016 about the Neolithic pit cluster and – even though part of the new school building now sits in a location that was once where early farmers lived – they knew nothing about this. A chance has been missed here.

As the Iron Age house was being built, ancient potsherds and charcoal were almost certainly found and probably handled and passed around; have we lost this kind of intimate connection with the past of the places that we live? Or can urban prehistory and serendipity of development-led archaeology give us hope?

This was after all a place that was “popular in prehistory”. This is close to home for me, and I need to do more.

Sources and acknowledgements: pulling together the information for the various evaluations and excavations above meant consulting a series of data structure reports, interim reports, Discovery and Excavation entries and some other bits and pieces. I have tried to keep the referencing as light touch as possible. These are the sources used for each site and – where possible – a link. See also the Trove link for each site in the text.

Larkhall Academy pit cluster (Trove ID 283916): Dutton, A and Atkinson, D 2006 Larkhall Academy South Lanarkshire, Unpublished Excavation Data Structure Report. Headland Archaeology Ltd.

Asda car park site (Trove ID 320593): Mitchell, S 2012 Land at Larkhall Academy, Larkhall, South Lanarkshire Archaeological Mitigation (Data Structure Report No. 2011), CFA Archaeology Ltd. See here

Home Bargains / Iceland site (Trove ID 348575): Mooney, K 2023 A Mesolithic camp, Bronze Age roundhouse and an Iron Age building at Nairn Street, Larkhall, South Lanarkshire. ARO53: GUARD Archaeology Ltd., available online here.

See also Rosie Bishop et al. 2010 Cereals, fruits and nuts in the Scottish Neolithic, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 139, 47-103. https://doi.org/10.9750/PSAS.139.47.103

The most (in)famous example of heavy metal and prehistory harmonising is surely the undersized Stone’enge that is slowly lowered into the midst of guitars and spandex in the 1984 mock-rock-doc This is Spinal Tap. Confusion over inches and feet is an appropriate mistake to make for a monument that has so often in the past been boiled down to measurements and azimuths. If this incident had really happened, then you can imagine the merch potential English Heritage would have squeezed out of mini-trilithons. (Actually, they have beat me to it with a Stonehenge Trilithon cushion.)

There is a fascinating post in Nancy Wisser’s blog Clonehenge where she explores some of the versions of this little grey trilithon that have appeared in various Spinal Tap live gigs since the first film, not all of which are true to the truly tiny original. In fact the size of Stone’enge has varied as much as Derek Smalls’ cod piece. One version that appeared at Glastonbury was “closer to 4 feet than 18 inches high”. Elsewhere Nancy notes that, “at least one real band did use a Stonehenge replica as a set back in the heyday of boomer rock, one so large that it didn’t fit into some venues. Which band? We’ve seen two or three mentioned but we’re told it was really Black Sabbath…”.

This has rather messily spread into the very much belated sequel Spinal Tap II: the end continues (2025) to the extent that a new version of the song has been recorded featuring Elton John himself, and the trilithons seem to have become part of the Tap brand. Fitting as both are national treasures that have been flogged to death.

Squeezing all of the juice out of this joke, the film also includes the band visiting an actual mini version of Stonehenge, and finally commissioning a proper one which they narrowly missed dropping on Sir Elton’s zombie hair.

Plus they recorded concert footage at Stonehenge, presumably vibrating the heck out of the concrete that holds together half of the original version of the monument. “’How fitting is it that this actual-probable-send-off is shot, historically, at Stonehenge, the mysterious landmark that we now know must have been erected thousands of years ago purely to serve as the setting for the last act of Spinal Tap,’ said Kent Sanderson, CEO of Bleecker Street, the company that’s distributing the concert” as reported in Rolling Stone magazine in October 2025. That’s as good a Stonehenge theory as any I’ve read to be honest.

Rock and Stonehenge have actually had a long relationship, as the late Tim Darvill noted on more than one occasion, notably in book chapters (go and have a look). More broadly, megaliths like standing stones and dolmen (real and imagined) have adorned album covers, t-shirts and inspired song titles and album themes. The double meaning of the word rock here barely needs to be mentioned. In fact I am embarrassed that I have done so.

So imagine my pleasure when I witnessed first hand in Glasgow recently some megalithic thrash metal action.

The venue? The Garage. The band? Blood Incantation. In their own words (or their webmaster’s) they are a Cosmic Death Metal Band formed in 2011 and are from Denver, Colorado. This was their first gig in Scotland, touring the 2024 album Absolute Elsewhere.

After moving into the ideal viewing location towards the middle and back of the venue (close to bar, not near toilet queue, equidistant between speakers), it became apparent that at either side of the stage were a pair of what appeared to be stone columns, with weird symbols carved into them. These had an eldritch, Lovecraftian quality. When lights were dimmed (most of the time to be fair) the symbols ominously glowed red.

In an interlude between two (very long) tracks, the lead singer asked a bemused audience, ‘has anyone ever seen a dolmen’? My excitable shouted affirmative answer was lost in the cheers, jeers and beers. Then they got back down to serious prog business again. Bodies began to surf in front of my eyes, hair and heads flapping back and forth like hairy heads connected to a typewriter. The number of the beast was writ large around me essayed in hand gestures.

At the end of the gig, we made our way against the flow of the crowd towards the front of the stage. I wanted to have a closer look at the ‘megaliths’ although this was somewhat thwarted by a fence across the front of the stage area and some security roadie types. I was able however to see some weirder anthropomorphic symbols that were are the bases of the column, out of my view during the gig. It was a glorious mish-mash of occult and weird, and very likely none of it made any sense whatsover, but it looked the part.

It was also much clearer that there was a lot of writing on more than one side and panel of the columns, some of which had an ancient Mesopotamia vibe. Whether this actually says anything or not who knows, but it represented a surprising amount of detail. Google translate has been no help. It was probably 3d printed and portentous in a confusing way.

I leaned over and asked one of the roadies what they were made of. Polystyrene he confirmed with the booming voice of someone who spends far too much time standing near speakers. Hardly a surprise given that even the fanciest tour bus would surely have struggled to store and move these monoliths had they been made of stone. They did look bloody heavy though and even as I wandered off, had not been unplugged, casting a sickly red glow onto the back of my hands.

I suppose this is a lesson for me: that there can be night off for the urban prehistorian. I cannot relax for a minute. Because allusions to prehistory, however wrong or stupid or surprising or baffling, seem to be everywhere. Maybe I am just tuned into this stuff now, and nobody else would even have noticed or cared. But I notice. And I care. So you don’t have to.

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to Andrew Baines for taking me to see Blood Incantation. They were jolly good.

Urban prehistory can still surprise me. On a recent trip to Belfast, I hoped that I might stumble upon something that would be blog post worthy, and I thought I had hit urban prehistory gold when I got off the train at the nearby city of Bangor and saw a standing stone in the station concourse.

It turns out that this megalith was erected for the millennium with a time capsule encased within it. This was set in place in 2000, and a plaque on the grey stone reads:

North Down Burgh Council Time Capsule Sealed in 2000 by Mayor Alan Chambers to be opened in 2100

I assume that the time capsule is the weird metal thing embedded into the stone beneath the plaque, unless it is just a fancy shelf.

This resulted in some nice social media interactions, but not much else.

And then came Pottinger’s Entry in Belfast.

On a walk in the city centre with Jan and archaeologist Rebecca Younger, we completely by chance came across a stunning tiled mural on Pottinger’s Entry with a distinctively prehistoric flavour. This passage is one of a number of parallel, narrow alleyways in the city centre, known collectively as the Belfast Entries. Crown Entry. Joys’ Entry. Wilson Court. Some of these are many centuries old at least in route it not material reality. It reminded me a bit of the many narrow ‘closes’ that run off the Royal Mile / High Street in Edinburgh without the steep slopes.

We turned into the Entry from High Street, and there it was! With no warning or information, resplendent with terracotta tiles covered in passage grave art symbols. I could barely believe my eyes – what I at first thought were spirals which were a bit like rock art resolved themselves into accurate copies of complex motifs from some of the most famous Neolithic megalithic tombs in Ireland.

It was a bit mind-blowing and the more I looked at the tiles, the more familiar motifs and symbols came into focus. Old friends and some new ones too. Weirdly, these were juxtaposed with images from newspapers covering local sporting events. I could not work out how on earth these things were connected to one another, and perhaps they were not. Maybe this is about communication, passing on shared community knowledge, being human.

Read all about it!! Newgrange! Knowth!

Magical and weird symbols danced in front of us, something of a tribute to the potentially hallucinatory nature of the original Neolithic carvings. Commuters, tourists, shoppers and assorted crowds of folk rushed past, as if the motifs were not even there. Why was everyone not marvelling at these symbols of power on this wall? What is wrong with these people?!

There was no information accompanying this arrangement of tiles, the only clue to its creation being a signature and date in the bottom left-hand corner tile. Jim MacKeever 1989 and a symbol beside it – his symbol which was perhaps inspired by Neolithic carvers. No name for the installation was provided nor was there any kind of information panel. Not even a bloody QR code, the 21st century equivalent of cups-and-rings.

I subsequently could not find out a huge amount about James MacKeever (1942-2024), who unfortunately passed away in November 2024. He was, “primarily known for his sculptures which, while being contemporary, contain reflections of a much longer history, with motifs and styles echoing the artworks of ancient civilisations. He is a long standing member of the Royal Ulster Academy of the Arts and a widely respected and collected artist” (source). I could not find much other work beyond paintings, but this UNTITLED Terracotta Clay Sculpture (which went to auction in 2011) continues the rock art theme. And indeed the same motif – source as yet unknown – appears on the Pottinger Entry tile mural bottom right in a more abridged form.

Another auctioned piece, called Newspaper Girls, strongly suggests a connection between these terracotta figures and the mural, which also combines rock art motifs with newspaper imagery. In this case, the replication is a spectacular carved kerbstone from Newgrange.

This description of MacKeever’s practice chimes with the Pottinger Entry Mural, but surprisingly I could find nothing else online about this specific piece – it may be I am using inefficient search terms online but I don’t know the reason for its commissioning, or even the name of the piece. But I do like the fact that we have passage (grave) art in a passage.

Returning to the tiles themselves, as noted, all of the motifs are faithful renditions of symbols from various Neolithic passage graves in Ireland. I did a little homework (and also got some help from Ken Williams via Twitter, and Robert Hensey) and came up with the following helpful table.

It is a cliché to say that rock art symbols are mysterious and difficult to make sense of, and so perhaps it is appropriate that this tiled masterpiece has the same opaqueness. Lost in the mists of time squared. The location of this tile installation at an liminal entry point, and a junction, strongly echoes passage grave art placement, but perhaps I am looking into this too deeply. Maybe the whole point is that we should just enjoy the dancing circles and squiggles, in the same way as I hope that the artists (now and in prehistory) took some pleasure in forming these shapes in a medium they felt comfortable working with. Never has the term rock art seemed so appropriate, but also so limited.

Acknowledgments: thanks to Becca Younger for her hospitality during our visit, and also to Robert Hensey and Ken Williams for their assistance in identifying rock art panel sources. The second photo of Knockmany is (probably) sourced from the National Museum Service.

What else would we be going to look at on a suburban street called Helleristningen, other than what this Norwegian word means: the rock carving.

Situated in an area of housing in Åskollen, south of Drammen on the west side of Oslo Fjord, this street winds its way past a caged outcrop, which has carved upon it a remarkable depiction of an elk.

This is not just an Elk. It is an ELK. The creature, as carved onto a domed grey rock, measures some 2m in length, and apparently until fairly recently was the largest depiction of an Elk in this format in Norway, until a 4m long elk carving was found at Utenga, in Lier, in 2013.

Unfortunately the light and leaf clitter was appalling for viewing this site, but even so it still charmed us all.

The Åskollen mega-elk is described thus on the local Drammen History webpage (translated obviously, not by me but google, apologies):

This is a work of art from Drammen created around 6,500 years ago! There is a rock carving that you can see at Åskollen. The image is 1.75 m long, and was probably made to bring hunting luck. We don’t know the meaning of the strange marks and lines on the animal’s body, but we assume it has something to do with the magic of capture. 

To my untrained idea, the patchwork pattern of lines on the side of the elk look like the guts, internal organs and cords, all of which would have been of huge use in the daily life of the hunter-gatherers who both revered and killed these beasts. (I am far from the only person who thinks this.) This depiction therefore has the quality of an X-ray, perhaps appropriate as rock carvings on outcrops like this could be viewed as marking thin places where the skin of the world is so thin that you can see its ribs.

This is emphasised today with the remnants of blood red paint filling in the lines that describe the form of the elk, fluid tracings, a practice that was once commonplace in Norway but that is now no longer approved of for conservation reasons.

The gate into this small square fenced compound has a rather threadbare metal noticeboard attached to it, with a brief paragraph of explanation for residents and visitors, in three languages (Norwegian, English, German). They have also gone for the guts theory, with an added fecundity angle towards the rump of the ‘great elk’. I was never very sure about the small bird however, even when tracing the symbols with my fingers, but I very much approve of the concept of hunting-magic.

I visited this panel in October, guided by Norwegian archaeologist Professor Håkon Glørstad, who works for the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo University. He smoothly drove me and a few other archaeologists around the west flank of the Oslo fjord on a glorious fieldtrip, taking in vast Viking burial mounds, the most northerly Neolithic dolmen in Europe, and a sea-side lunch. As we drove away from one rock art panel, Håkon made a wonderful observation about how loved elk were by the hunters – they would even have dreamt about them he said while negotiating a traffic intersection. And the rock art depictions of these creatures is indeed dreamlike – almost hallucinatory, meat and miscellaneous supplies on the hoof, a mobile IKEA. Electrifying.

This took on extra significance when he took us to see another rock art panel in the same conurbation, this one on the Forest Road in Skogerveien, but one that has evidence of rather more investment into the curation and display of the carved outcrop.

Here is a stunning panel carved with two fish, a big fish or whale, a big and small elk (mini-moose) and other forms that have variously been described as beaver, bird or bloke. This is on a suburban street corner, and is displayed within a stone compound sheltered by a curving roof, all supported by a steel frame. This elegant structure is crammed into the a corner space right beside a house, and it is something of a surprise that this structure does not have its own number and post-box. There is a real degree of discomfort here, an uneasy relationship, that is reinforced by the knowledge (from the Cultural Memory website linked to above) that “Samples were taken under the road, but the rock was blown to pieces during the road construction“. Here, prehistory and the needs of the modern world did not so much crash together as explode.

That’s a shame, as this seems to be what the bigger picture once looked like.

This is a big rock, reddish in hue – granite for goodness sake! – with the fine range of animal symbols carved over the surface having a very kinetic form, a menagerie of movement (or as MR James put it, ‘movement without sound’). There is a much more stylised elk than we saw at the other panel, almost angular, and lacking in the guts department, plus a much smaller mini-elk, perhaps a representation of perspective Father Ted style. Then there are the fish! Or are they leaves? The supposed whale is a veritable whopper, perched towards the top of the humpbacked outcrop. The detail is nicely rendered and they look almost alive, pecked and ground into life.

This set of figures is, as reported in the page for this site in the wonderful Megalithic Portal, only scratching the surface of the scale of these scratches on the surface, as the panel “consists of 46 different figures, but only 7 of them have been made possible to view for visitors”. Some may survive below the road I suppose, under which the panel slips like a petrified lava flow.

The juxtaposition of the fish and elk, of the water and the land, make this a powerful image. It suggests to me a place of flux, of a malleable materiality. This reminds me of the similarity between cup-and-ring marks, and ripples on otherwise still water: rock art somehow turns stone into liquid, and it is possible to believe that these fish are swimming through the rock. This is a rock of conflations. Lahelma (2007) has described the large elk still on display here as a ‘boat-antlered elk’, that is, the horns are also a boat motif, a relatively common combination left behind by Eurasian hunter-gatherers. The fact that the symbols must have been carved over an unknown time in relation to one another simply adds to the sense of this as an emergent narrative of contradictions and liminality.

The sense of movement that leaps out from this rock art panel is reinforced by Lahelma’s suggestion that we can fall back on more recent ethnographic accounts of hunters of the far north. For them, “both elk and boats could function as the shaman’s vehicles in the passage from this world to the other”, reinforcing my other comments about such sites being liquid, thin places. But enough – this is not a blog about rock art, fascinating as it is to speculate, but rather about the presentation to the public, and the urban setting.

A small shiny plaque reads (and again I have translated): The securing of and information about the petroglyphs has been financed with contributions from the DNB Savings Bank Foundation [a charitable foundation] [and then some stuff about the charity].

That’s nice but not very exciting. What is exciting however is that there is a bank of light switches that, when pressed, illuminate each of the symbols carved onto the rock for a short while. This, even in the late afternoon sunlight, was a special effect that dissolves away the faint traces of red paint one can still see even on this site. Electrifying.

This creates a similar effect to the more traditional paint, but obviously is not as potentially damaging to the rock art. I would have loved to be there at night, to see this in the dark, this nocturnal canvas, and I know that there is a school of thought that prehistoric sites such as this may well have been designed to view by moonlight. This is also perhaps when some of these animals would be most comfortable and relaxed. It made me wonder: do hunter gatherers dream of electric elk?

There is a rather less innovative noticeboard at the bottom of the street that I confess I was only able to photograph rather badly from the car!

These two rock art panels are in their own right rather wonderful, and it was interesting to see how they have been absorbed into the urban world so comfortably, almost effortlessly. The Åskollen panel shows an earlier iteration of this process, with a street name and cage combination that works effectively enough. The deep red paint traces that remain here are indicative of this site being representative of an earlier ethos for the study and presentation of these sites, but the main thing is that it remains, and was not compromised or moved to make way for houses. The Skogerveien panel is startingly futuristic, the curves, steel and neon giving this ancient rock a science fiction look, the animal symbols carved onto the side almost like branding that someone was paid a million pounds to design. This site is closer to houses but also feels more removed, almost cave-like in its form, the fish and elk looking to escape from the 21st century hunter-gatherers camped all around them, the last survivors in the tarmac jungle.

There is no doubt that in Norway they know how to do urban prehistory well!

Sources and acknowledgements: firstly I would like to give a big thanks to Håkon Glørstad for taking us on this day trip which involved a lot of driving! Thanks also to the archaeologists who joined us on the day, Rosie Bishop, Ingrid Mainland, and Astrid Nyland. We had a lot of fun!

Source cited: Antti Lahelma 2007 ‘On the Back of a Blue Elk’: Recent Ethnohistorical Sources and ‘Ambiguous’ Stone Age Rock Art at Pyhänpää, Central Finland, Norwegian Archaeological Review, 40:2, 113-137

Trond Lødøen 2017 The Meaning and Use(-fulness) of Traditions in Scandinavian Rock Art Research. DOI:10.2307/j.ctvh1dpgg.5

Me, tracing my fingers in and out of the coarse surface of cupmarks on a stone in the sun, with red paint marks on the rock beside me. Again. Not in Faifley, but Oslo.

To be precise this happened on a walk with fellow archaeologist Ingrid Mainland in Ekebergparken, on the south side of the harbour fjord of the Norwegian capital city. The park is better known for a stunning collection of sculptures and art installations, and a fine hunter-gatherer rock art panel near the entrance to the park, decorated with elk, deer and hunting images.

This particular rock are panel, and connections between rock art and contemporary artworks in the park, will be discussed in more depth in my Bloomsbury Contemporary Archaeology of Prehistory book [link to be added when the book is actually published!] but in this blog post I want to specifically focus on the cupmarks that I traced with my fingers.

There are a lot of cupmarked stones in the park and on its fringes, belonging to a later carving tradition, scattered on outcrops across higher points of the landscape than the hunting panel. They are in the woods, beside paths, and in a caravan and camping site.

The cupmarks we visited were marked on a map showing heritage sites in the park.

To get there, we walked via a very steep uphill path called the Mesolithic Climb, enjoying increasingly stunning views over the city and the relatively newly opened Munch Museum. This path was marked with noticeboards outlining some of the prehistoric discoveries in the area, in some cases marking the height in the landscape of former waterlines.

The cupmarks were not as clearly signposted however, and so we used a mobile-phone-taken photo of the map with heritage sites marked on it to orientate ourselves. We paused as we passed a stunning and complex moving pair of sinuous stainless steel rods, a piece called The Dance by British artist George Cutts (2013). The guidebook to the park, and park website, notes that, the:

“slim, elegant forms keep shifting in an enthralling and almost mesmerizing dance. The artist presents us with optical illusions and plays with the interaction between shapes“.

It was indeed hypnotic, but it is also interesting to reflect on how this description could also be applied to a rock surface carved with cups and rings. Hypnotic curves that were perhaps themselves the product of trance-like states, materialised in repeated circular actions.

We walked on, out of the park, into the caravan and camping site, which by the late summer / early autumn already had an air of abandonment about it, with only a few campervans and caravans in their plots in defiance of the changing of the season. As we walked from outcrop to outcrop, displaying the mad stooping gait of archaeologists on the hunt, breakfasting couples sat at white plastic tables outside their caravan door, watching us as they chewed.

We noticed that the campsite had been laid out in a patchwork of parched working plots, defined by increasingly faded boundaries, that nonetheless spoke of territoriality. Some boulders drew our attention, because they straddled a ridged space that nibbled into four plots. Their liminal positioning and irregular form, unfriendly to vehicle chassis, meant that it could not be a plot in its own right. It was four plots but no plot at all. But it was besides Plot 172. Plot 172 adjacent if you will.

The boulders are, in fact, part of an improvised stone circle, which Ingrid spotted while I was too busy on my knees with the cupmarks on the outcrop that they surround. The outcrop itself is subcircular, a couple of metres in diameter, with a modest collection of small cupmarks that become slightly less modest the more one looks and gets your eye in.

The cupmarks sat within a grid-like pattern of straight cracks in the rock, and beside them was a bold streak of red spray paint, a large L with a swirl coming from the angle. The colourful palette was enhanced by white blotches of lichen, and deep green moss intruding through the cracks in the rock face. The rock itself, fifty shades of grey, and sedimentary I think, was rough to the touch, but the cupmarks were smooth with time.

An information board was fixed to one of the standing stones, and was – and this is perfectly understandable – written in Norwegian. Aside from a very brief paraphrasing of the main text in a short paragraph in English. There was also a photo of the cupmarks, rendered redundant by the existence of the actual cupmarks 2m to the right of the noticeboard, and a map depicting other cupmarks in the area, most of which seem to be in the surrounding woodland.

I painstakingly translated the Norwegian. This type of carved motif is called a Skalgroper, which translates in English as ‘bowl pit’, a variant on cupmark. (The a should have a wee circle or ring above it, a diacritic shared by a number of languages, not just Nordic ones.) The text goes on to explain that this is the most common rock art symbol in Norway, and they were probably carved between the Bronze Age and early Iron Age periods. They may be associated with places in the landscape where people were farming, perhaps summer pastorage, and their meaning “leaves a lot of room for interpretation”. Rather wonderfully the noticeboard text also says: “Rock art probably has a connection with the imaginary world of the past”. There is also some text that relates to the management of the site, including avoiding walking on the stone (did my crawling contravene this?) and adding that it is “illegal to light bonfires on the rock face”.

Lodoen and Mandt, in their 2010 study, The rock art of Norway, dedicate some time in the book to discussing possible interpretations for cupmarks. There were historic folk tales, and work by early archaeologists, that defined recurring associations with sacrifice and deposition, the marks being used as cups or bowls to contain food offerings, blood or milk. Fertility was also a broad early theme, albeit it fuzzily defined. However, more recent concerns with placing the symbols in the context of the rock they are carved upon, and placing the rock in the wider landscape, have been more fruitful lines of enquiry. This has led to a relationship being identified between these carvings, and summer grazing.

“The cup mark sites lie almost without exception in lush, mountain pastureland with ample access to fresh drinking water … cup marks are also found along the paths between mountain farms or on the cattle tracks from the permanent farms up to the mountains” (page 193).

In other words these symbols, at least in sub-Alpine Norway, tend to be found in places that have, historically, been used as summer grazing zones in the landscape, an association that might reasonably be pushed back into prehistory, in a landscape that has always been challenging to farm. This interpretation is by no means definitive, but these simple symbols speak of people who had time on their hands, and with a desire to leave their mark on the land.

A nearby cupmarked outcrop, back in the park itself, has its own information panel, which repeats much of the same information, and a viewing platform. Shrouded in the patchy shadows of trees, with flickering light on the surface, these cupmarks were alive with light and shadow, but more difficult to identify. This made be realise that the local environs of these symbols may well have played a role in how easy they were to carve, see, and use. This woodland setting, as opposed to the open and shadowless cupmarked stone in the campsite, was also a perfect environment for more extensive moss and lichen coverage. This was a hairier stone.

The plan view of cupmarks, the circle form, was chosen in the park to symbolise the symbol, becoming a leitmotif for the motif. A metal plate laid across the pathway in the park indicated that you were passing Skalgroper in a most literal and visual form. Circles and letters, letters and circles. Our symbols … and theirs.

SKALGROPFELT: bowl pit field, a collection of cupmarks stones. Although we could not find any more.

Back in the charming museum for the park, near the entrance and tram stop, the cupmarks were again depicted in 2-dimensional circular format, this time in an abstract wall display.

The small information panel described these as “mysterious rock carvings” and perhaps they are, although they are only mysteries if one focuses on what they meant, because we can never know. But why does what they meant matter? The intention was surely bodily – the repose watching cows flicking flies, the scrape of stone on stone, rubbing, losing oneself, imprinting yourself into the hard rock, bending its surface for many, many lifetimes.

“Perhaps the motif – the cup mark itself – was not of prime importance, but rather the very act of carving out a section in the rock” wrote Lodoen and Mandt (pg 199), and others have expressed this sense too.

This is a timeless human act. By tracing my fingers along the concave bowls on the carved rock overlapping with Lot 172, I continued to deepen this mark, atom by atom, leaving behind my DNA until the rains come.

Sources and acknowledgements: I would like to thank Ingrid for her company of this walk, and for her observation skills and insightful thoughts.

Our time in Oslo is being funded by the Centre for Advanced Studies, working with Dr Rosie Bishop on the Climate, Crops and Crisis project, for which I am extremely grateful.

Sources referred to in the text are:

Trond Lodoen and Gro Mandt 2010 The Rock Art of Norway, Windgather Press, 2010

TC Jensen (ed) 2022 Ekebergparken Guide (English). Oslo: Ekebergparken.

“Why does that Wetherspoons have a drawing of a standing stone outside?” I asked incredulously a few months back during a visit to the soon-to-be levelled down (funded by levelling up money) Cumbernauld Antonine shopping centre. Soon followed by, “…and it is called The Carrick Stone!”. Little more encouragement was needed to go inside to, er, investigate, the schematic drawing of a lumpy standing stone on a wooden panel drawing me in.

Through information panels in the pub and a visit to canmore, I quickly established a real blind spot in my knowledge of North Lanarkshire archaeology – that there is a putative Roman altar stone in the new town of Cumbernauld. How did I not know this? I guess because it is ‘Roman’ but frankly a wee standing stone is a wee standing stone, and so I followed it up. And there must have been Iron Age folk about at the time who scratched their head upon seeing this stone. Surely the Empire could do better than that?

The Carrick Stone is a rather enigmatic lump of Roman Scotland, located currently (originally? perhaps not) on a ridge to the south of the Antonine Wall. However, there is some confusion as to whether monolith really was traditionally called this or not (certainly not by the Romans!) which matters as the name was a farm, and is now an area of Cumbernauld. Let’s not worry about whether it is Carrick Stone or Carrickstone please.

In the 1845 New Statistical Account, Watson notes the existence of the stone in the already so-named Carrickstone Farm that he thought looked like a Roman altar, although a story was also noted that it “has a hole in it, where, tradition says, Robert the Bruce planted his standard before the battle of Bannockburn”. It may be here that Watson was conflating two different stones as we will see.

The stone was documented in some detail by William Donelly towards the end of the 19th century. His short note was entitled:

NOTE OF A STONE ON THE MOOR NEAR DULLATUR, CALLED THE CARRICK STONE, SHAPED LIKE A ROMAN ALTAR, AND HAVING CUPS ON ITS UPPER SURFACE. WITH A DRAWING.

Here’s the drawing:

The stone was described by Donelly who was fixated with what he saw as large cupmarks on top which he felt meant the Roman attribution was dodgy. He repeated the Watson story about Bruce but also did some investigation into the farm name and found the confusion, the farm being named for a nearby large slab with CARRICK written on it, with records of the farm name going back to 1401. What we now call the Carrick Stone was generally known rather more mundanely as the standing stone or the Roman altar.

There is a later note in canmore from an OS fieldworker in 1957 suggesting that the letters CAR could be seen on the altar. But this additionally confusing observation was soon shut down: “This stone is a Roman Altar. The stone is now in a mutilated condition, and any original inscription has been obliterated. Its general shape, however, and such traces of mouldings as survive round its base and head show it to be undoubtedly Roman” (letter from Kenneth Steer dated December 1957 also quoted in canmore).

So far as I can tell there is no evidence to say that this is definitively a Roman altar stone although it is described as such by RCAHMS (1982) and is included on their excellent 2008 Antonine Wall map. Patricia Weeks, then Antonine Wall World Heritage Site Co-ordinator, added notes to canmore in 2017 to the effect that this was very likely Roman, but badly weathered.

“The Roman altar known as the Carrick Stone is one of the less well-known Roman sites in Scotland, but it is unusual in that it may still stand in its original location after nearly 2000 years, albeit in the surroundings of a housing estate”.

Certainly it is featured in the 2012 Roman national panel of Scotland’s Archaeological Research Framework. In section 4.5, Landscapes of Belief, it is noted that, “one altar is believed still to stand in its original position, offering remarkable opportunities for research – the Carrick Stane, sitting forlornly in a housing estate at Cumbernauld” and the proximity of both Antonine Wall and the Roman forts at Westerwood and Castlecary is useful context. It is speculated in ScARF that this altar was once part of a temple, perhaps still waiting to be found. (See here for loads more great AW content.)

Personally the surrounding houses and water storage towers that bothered the writers quoted above only added to the allure for me, and so I embarked on a campaign of fieldwork that involved visiting the actual Carrick Stone, followed by another visit for lunch and a pint at the Carrick Stone pub.

I parked nearby in the drizzle and tried to orientate myself, quickly coming across a sign on the path to the stone suggesting this track followed a 2000 year old route, the Via Pavii. (Latin for paved road.)

Within a minute I was there, and frankly it was an underwhelming experience.

There it was, all stumpy and lumpy, a stone rottweiler of a megalith, squatting in the grass and for all I know disobeying dog toilet instructions stuck onto a nearby lamppost. The overgrown grass, victim of council cutbacks by not being cut back, caressed its grey sides in the light breeze, and nettles stood guard. I straddled over the fence, laid my hands on the cratered but smooth top surface, and squatted to examine the side carvings or lack thereof. My ankles and knees were lightly dampened by the experience.

Indeed the urban setting and the fence dampened down the impact of this stone, but upon turning round things started to get interesting.

Looming over the stone was one of two water towers on this hill, amidst the housing and a network of roads and paths, propped up on concrete legs that I could not see but I knew were there. These towers have always struck me as looking like abandoned alien spacecraft. Via Pavii indeed.

I am not the only one to be bemused by the experience of visiting this site so it seems. The Carrick Stone has one of the most amusing TripAdvisor pages I have seen with two spoof 5 star reviews posted several years apart. Someone even created a comedy user name (Walter Stone) simply to post a nonsensical review.

Perhaps this is a stone that simply attracts derision, even if it is clear there is a lot of local concern for the monument, with ongoing complaints about the lack of grass cutting at the site, and it was locals and the local council that got the informative noticeboard erected in the recent past – including in Gaelic (but not Latin).

That past visitors took chips away as souvenirs may explain its weird form, but also offers a point of comparison with Stonehenge.

I am also interested in the evolution of the presentation of this stone: caged megaliths tend to have interesting modern biographies in relation to attempts to present them to the public and, to an extent, protect them from visitors. This monument is no exception!

The next part of the trip was lunch and a pint of brown stuff at the actual Carrick Stone pub, one of the Wetherspoons chain. Say what you want about this much maligned brand, but they usually have good historical detail in the websites for each pub, and this one is no different. As I had seen on my first visit, inside the pub there are also some information panels, in a kind of scrapbook form, that historically contextualise the locality and the Carrick Stone itself.

Even before entering, of course, there is the stylised and oversized drawing of the stone itself, black on wood, pictured above, but there is also a plaque on the wall beside a second entrance which explains the name of the ‘free house’ a little, and repeats the Bruce connection.

Inside the Bruce story is depicted to the maxium(us) effect, with two panels focusing on Bruce and the Battle of Bannockburn. (Why would Bruce have been in Cumbernauld just before that famous 1314 battle!? As it happens we went there for lunch at more like 1414.)

I love this one – the random Roman distance slab in the corner, assorted images of the Bruce and the battle, and the curious suggestion he beat the ‘British’ on that day.

The next image, hidden in a darker corner (and cursed by a Home Bargains reflection), focuses on Bannockburn again, and some ornate script on a drawing of a parchment repeats the connection between the Carrick Stone, Bruce’s big stick, and the battle, depicted in drawing format with Stirling Castle perched in the corner.

The Carrick Stone is an ancient monument standing in what is known as the new town of Carrickstone. This is where according to local tradition, Robert the Bruce planted his standard before the Battle of Bannockburn.

And there is Bruce again on my menu!!

The best has been saved to last, a really nice panel that focuses on the Antonine Wall, which is great to see, especially if you were to sit on one of the stools about 3 inches from it.

The Ant wall is shown in map form. Tick. An old school Historic Scotland sign is included. Tick. There is even an image of the famous lilia at Rough Castle fort near Bonnybridge. Tick and smiley face. The text is even OK if in a wonky font. But what on earth are all of the other stone buildings depicted here? The Antonine Wall is not actually a stone wall as I never tire of telling my students. But the whole effect is rather pleasing.

The sad thing is that this was something of a building at risk survey, as the shopping mall within which this pub is located is to be bulldozed, I assume with the free house, the Wetherspoons’ carpet, and all those lovely signs now counting down the days until they go the way of the Empire. And there are other nice things in here – poems, references to local public art, photos of old Cumbernauld village. Not so much the toilets though. On borrowed time.

The 2022 decision by HES not to List the famous brutalist shopping centre was probably one nail in the coffin, loved by architects and hated by anyone who doesn’t like buildings that look like they came from the sets of a Soviet science fiction film.

And also under threat is an endearing bit of almost hidden urban prehistory that I have photographed every time I have walked past it over the last few years, usually while lost in the maze of corridors and stairwells in this part of the mall.

Demolition will happen within 10 years (according to the Council) so you have not got long to explore the shopping mall, the Via Pavii, and the pub! I can recommend all three experiences….

Sources and acknowledgments: thanks to Jan as usual for accompanying me on the fieldwork for this blog and ordering food using the app on her phone due to Wifi problems at my end.

Donelly, W A. 1897 Note of a stone on the moor near Dullatur, called the Carrick Stone, shaped like a Roman altar, and having cups on its upper surface, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 31, 1896-7, Pages 228-30. Download here.

RCAHMS 1982 The archaeological sites and monuments of Cumbernauld and Kilsyth District and Strathkelvin District, Strathclyde Region, The archaeological sites and monuments of Scotland series no 2. Revision. Edinburgh. Page: 8, No.12 

What if standing stones were not erected in the Neolithic period as a focal point for ceremony and ritual, but rather the stones themselves were the object of worship?

This startling thought (not an original one I’m sure) came to me during a Neolithic Studies Group field visit to Yorkshire in May 2024. In particular the massive megaliths at the Devil’s Arrow and Rudston imposed themselves on my thinking with their extravagance. All of these stones were – so the story goes – at one point or another thrown by the Devil, medieval rationalisation for inexplicable pagan profanities. They certainly threw me.

Climbing from my hire car into an already warm sun on that May morning, the Devil’s Arrows were part of an assault on the senses. Two of the stones stood to attention in a scrubby field decorated with shell middens and chicken shit left there recently by the farmer, unctuous organic mounds that teemed with bird life, offerings for the fertility of the field in an acknowledgement that the stones don’t work like that anymore.

The following day we went to Rudston via Duggleby Howe barrow. The view upon entering the church yard within which this might megalith is contained is dominated by the giant standing stone, reputedly and measurably the tallest standing stone in Britain. It protrudes grotesquely from amongst gravestones which look tiny by comparison, clustered around its base like hungry children crowding a giant waiting for crumbs from his table.

The stone is a deep grey brown sedimentary with various markings on its surface that can’t quite be resolved into any shapes or forms no matter how long one stares. And one does stare, as it is difficult to take one’s eyes off this giant. Perhaps most startling of all of the protective metal cap sitting on top of the stone, like a helmet jammed onto the head of a petrified orc.

Taking stock, the NSG great and good sat around eating lunch, and then congregated at the foot of the stone, hopelessly dominated. Archaeologists have always been driven to visit this stone, drawn to this place, to try to make sense of it while not being overwhelmed or overly emotional. (It is just a standing stone after all.) This is not however a standing stone that can be theorised or measured into making sense, being pretty much impossible to excavate. Sometimes one had to admit defeat and be struck by awe.

The church is overshadowed by the monolith literally and in all other respects. Literature produced and sold in the Church tells us more about the stone than the church, reinforcing the sense that the real focus of rites in this place is the monolith and not the messiah.

For instance, a whole pamphlet is dedicated to The Monolith and contains an eccentric and even feverish narrative about the pagan origins of the stone and this place, written by a W W Gatenby (who died in 2001). “If we turn to the book of Joshua in the Old Testament, we read that when Joshua destroyed the city of Jericho [itself a Neolithic site], rather more than 2,000 BC, he found two tall standing stones outside the temple of the pagan god Baal”. In this, WWG saw symbolically at least the upright nature of the church steeple, pointing to the heavens, but then so does the monolith.

However, unlike the church spire, the standing stone also points down to the underworld. A pamphlet called “All Saints” Church, Rudston. A short guide (date and author unknown) notes than, “An excavation conducted by Sir William Strickland in the late 18th century suggested that its depth below ground is as great as its height”. Hmm, unlikely, but then what is this standing stone standing on? A giant tooth set into the gums of the land.

A postcard sold in the church bear the legend on the back: “PARISH CHURCH OF ALL SAINTS AND RUDSTON MONOLITH” without a comma, suggesting that this church even bears the name of the stone. “Over 25 feet high, this Bronze Age stone is the largest monolith in Britain, and was probably a pagan worship monument” it continues.

There must surely have been – and perhaps still is – a cult of Rudston, with the standing stone being the ultimate relic, maintained in conspiracy by whispering locals. Some kind of relict survivor of the ‘indigenous pagan religion’ as discussed in the church pamphlet that the construction of the church was supposed to put a stop to. Inside the church is a painting of the standing stone (and the church and graveyard), prints available for £30. Here the stone looks even bigger than its 8m height. The stark grey depiction of the stone has decolourised it: prehistory seems to be black and white, a simpler time.

This is heightened by the sense that the standing stone and church-mound sit in the apex of a much larger sacred landscape, with five cursus monuments radiating outwards (or inwards) from the monolith. This is depicted in a strange 3D model display in the church, and also the reality for local people that some of them probably have a cursus ditch under their gardens and houses.

All of this is held together by the glue of the Gypsey Race, a river that bisects four of the cursus monuments and would have had to be crossed were these routes to be followed. There is an entanglement here of water and stone, place and people.

Because these are stones with communities – houses sit nearby, bedroom windows overlook them, and they are at the very least peri-urban. I can’t help but think that simply looking out of a window at massive standing stones day after day must have some kind of psychological impact on even the most unimaginative of individuals.

They even have streets named in their honour, a further input into the everyday psychology of living with megaliths.

Julian Cope has written about the Arrows bemoaning this urban setting: “the vile and claustrophobic situation in which the Devil’s Arrows have now found themselves” is down to the Romans building a road through this sacred landscape and subsequent developments of that road (now a motorway which hums pleasingly in the background).

For what it is worth, I prefer to think that there is a healthy children of the stones vibe at the Devil’s Arrows.

While at Rudston, legendary archaeologist Richard Bradley told us a remarkable story. During a journey to examine a thesis (in 1979?) he stopped in at the churchyard, suit and tie, the whole business. It was raining and preparations were underway for a funeral. He peered down into a freshly cut grave and spotted the profile of a ditch in section in the graveside. Unable to carry out any further investigation, this nonetheless suggested to Bradley that this might have been the remnants not of a cursus but rather some kind of enclosure around the eminence upon which the monolith and church sit.

This brought to mind a prehistoric horror set at a very similar church in rural England, the one investigate during the 2014 film The Borderlands (aka Final Prayer). This spectacular found footage film (spoiler alert) ended with the revelation that a huge ancient creature lived beneath the church, in the hill, periodically digesting (or being fed) humans. Those who had worshipped this beast had carved tunnels into the hill and adorned them with arcane rock art symbols, and set up altars for rites. Perhaps without precedent in the history of horror films, evidence was also produced during the film of an archaeological aerial photograph showing several concentric rings of earthwork enclosing the hilltop and church.

When Bradley’s told us about his graveside discovery, a shiver went down my spine. What was enclosed here? What was being kept within? Or lurking beneath our feet?

The most obvious answer is not a beast, but the stone. No matter how hard Christianity tries to push back!

Standing stones have been revered for millennia and continue to be repurposed for reverence. Crosses have been stuck atop then (as may have been the case at Rudston (source)), murals painted, symbols carved. Some have been placed in cages or glass houses. Standing stones have a uncontainable power that we seem unable to control, and they can shape-change to be anything we want them to be. The late Chris Tilley has written (The Materiality of Stone, 2004) about the kinetic energy of standing stones, many of which look as if they are about to move, or have moved when our eyes were elsewhere. I think that this is because deep down we see them as much more than inorganic matter. They are literally smeared with our DNA and entangled with our bodies and minds, living stone. Worthy of our attention and respect.

On the day after my first visit to see the Arrows, I went back again the following morning, to break bread and drink coffee in the shadow of the stones (with window closed due to the smell).

In the flat morning light they seemed much smaller, the nervous energy of the day before having dissipated. And then I realised that is because (a) I was further away, and (b) these are stones that need an audience, a groups of willing supplicants to crowd around and marvel, to bend the knee, take photographs, recite our litanies of dates, measurements, facts and anecdotes. Our archaeological knowledge is in fact nothing more than a series of incantations, rites of worship and, even if we might not admit it, adoration. Neolithic hobbyists are the perfect congregation for these giant monoliths, academic acolytes celebrating the cult of stones. Archaeologists are the cultists.

What will we one day awake through our endless meddling?

Sources and acknowledgements – I would like to thank all those who came on the NSG trip to Yorkshire. I picked a lot of brains but none of them could have anticipated where my thoughts would lead me. Especial thanks to Emma Watson and Seren Griffiths. Sources for images and words used in the blog post can be found in the text and captions.

Thanks to the diligent and hard work of Clonehenge, we have a really good understanding of Stonehenge replicas and pastiches from across the world. There are a surprisingly large number of these, over 100 (!!), from complete and partial replications of the original monument itself, to installations and structures inspired by those (in)famous trilithons in a range of different materials. “Clonehenge covers replicas and models of Stonehenge from the sublime to the ridiculous” is the very fair claim made on the blog site that curates all of this information. I’ve been thinking about Stonehenge replicas in the past few years with Rebecca Younger, and others have been researching the phenomenon, such as cultural geographer Tim Edensor who has written about the controversial Achill Henge in Ireland (Edensor and Smith 2020). So when I was holidaying in northern Iceland in the summer of 2023, I just had to take the opportunity to visit the most northerly franchise of Stonehenge – Arctic Henge!

OK, as Clonehenge notes, this is not an actual replica of Stonehenge. “Not in the sense we’ve been using for that term until now, but at winter solstice the resemblance comes to the fore. Like Stonehenge they seem to forge a bond between us as entities of the landscape and the dance of the bodies in the dome above us”. So this megalithic structure takes inspiration from aspects of that weird stone circle in Wiltshire, has trilithons of a sort and uses the -henge suffix.

By way of digression before we get into the detail of Arctic Henge, this reminds me that in the summer of 2009 Jan and I visited Stonehenge Aoteroa, a replica of Stonehenge to the north of Wellington in New Zealand.

Rather like the Sighthill stone circle in Glasgow, this monument is very much astronomically focused, although there are also embedded within its architecture the presentation of Māori stories about the skies and constellations.

This makes me wonder if Jan and I are two of the few people in the world who have achieved the hat-trick of visiting the most northerly and the most southerly Stonehenge replicas in the world as well as the original Stonehenge. This should become a thing except for the appalling carbon footprint of doing it. Bad me.

Anyway, back to Arctic Henge, a remarkable work in progress that appears to be a valiant attempt to get more people to visit a rather remote corner of Iceland, the small town of Raufarhöfn, the most northerly town and within 8km of the actual Arctic circle.

The monument – also known as Heimskautsgerðið – was the vision of the late Erlingur Thoroddsen, working with artist Haukur Halldórsson, with the idea emerging in the 1990s and construction beginning in 2004. The monument is tied up in complex Icelandic dwarf symbology and mythology, as well as having solstice alignments built into its form. The whole story can be found here, and so I won’t go into huge amounts of detail here, as the vision and plans for this monument are a bit bamboozling.

The monument is connected to 72 dwarves, each allocated a different five days of the year, with “the four cardinal dwarves of Norse mythology, Austri, Norðri, Suðri and Vestri … befittingly face their namesake, east, north, south and west”. There are a whole host of other dwarves, none of them called Sneezy, and the website for the monument leaves it ambiguous as to what this all actually means although everyone should be able to work out who their dwarf is based on birthdate I think, a nice gimmick that deserves merch. There are also allusions to ‘endless horizons’ (true although it was foggy all of the time we were there), the midnight sun, and solstices – the circle being characterised as a ‘sun dial’.

The monument is some 50m in diameter, and is dominated by four enormous pairs of pillars which form ‘gates’ with an even bigger central setting. I assume they are made of blocks of lava. These are the most recognisable elements of Arctic Henge, often shown in photos with the Northern Lights playing in the background.

The biggest of these sits in the centre of the circle, formed of four angular arches. This facilitates the four site lines across the monuments so that the monument can be used to view solstice events through the legs of the gates as it were. It also has a wee tiny hole in the middle in the top.

As noted already, this is a work in progress. Money seems to have dried up and crowdfunding is being used to try and move things along. You can donate here, apparently the project only needs 1.3 million dollars to be completed. There is no doubt that a lot of work needs to be done when one sees the final vision for this place.

During our visit we stayed at the nearby Hotel Northern Lights (Hótel Norðurljós), and in the lobby there were plans and even a model of the Henge which hinted at Thoroddsen’s vision.

In fact he owned the hotel and so in part I suppose this was to drum up business for this rather austere property – and perhaps to provide entertainment as THERE ARE NO TELEVISIONS IN THE ROOMS!! He told Meet the North in an interview not long before he passed away that he wanted to reverse the fortunes of this small town that has been in steady decline since the collapse of the herring industry in the 1960s. I love people like this – visionaries who ignore conventional logic to make their dream happen. The replica Stonehenge world has a lot of folk like this.

Images online confirm the scale of what this monument might one day look like, such as this one from the Iceland Dream website (original source unknown but it is clearly based on the model pictured above).

When (if, rather than when works better I fear) finished it will include a circle of 68 small standing stone – the non-cardinal dwarves with weird names – and the official website for the project suggests that the whole 10m high central edifice would one day be topped with a “cut prism-glass that splits up the sunlight unto the primary colors [sic]”. I guess that explains the wee hole.

It is all very tantalising! Here’s another visualisation from Bensozia blog, again artist unknown.

And this image, reproduced by Clonehenge, was once on the official website (no more) and shows other proposed weird internal features:

This, then, is an epic project in a crazy place and I suppose a parallel might be the never-ending construction of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, although Thoroddsen himself saw a closer parallel – Stonehenge itself. He told Meet the North that, “It took 1,500 years to finish Stonehenge,” and in this sense, he is correct. Because Stonehenge was always a work in progress. It was never finished in the conventional sense of what we mean by that word, and a series of eccentric and impractical visionaries probably drove the project on crowdsourcing labour and big standing stones. But in all likelihood whatever the final, final vision might have been was unachievable.

Visiting the site is in itself a powerful experience regardless of the weather. The huge gate structures dwarf (no pun intended) and overlook the village as you drive towards it from the south.

As noted already, when we visited, there was a lot of low cloud and that sort of unpleasant cold rain slapped our faces as we left the car to inspect a frankly glorious information panel in a lay by near the site.

From there we walked up to the site, a few hundred metres away up a gentle slope, some of it with a path. The first thing that struck me was the massive car park that has been constructed here, which literally is visible from space if you count google earth as space. This seems to me the very definition of a white elephant, but perhaps aspirational would be a better expression. There is no harm, I suppose, in planning for some future problem parking scenario. It is difficult to see this ever being full. We visited in the middle of summer and there was no-one else there.

And yes, the site is a work in progress, and there was evidence for quite recent activity around the boardwalk that takes one from the massive car park up to the monument itself. Some elements seemed fairly freshly worked on, and there were a lot of blue pipes knocking about.

Once up on the site, it proved to be endlessly photogenic as one might imagine. There were stunning views and juxtapositions in almost all directions, the dramatic megaliths working perfectly in harmony with the grey sky and the Fargo-esque town next door. The lack of visitors in contrast to actual Stonehenge was refreshing.

We were also able to appreciate some of the less commonly photographed elements of the monument, such as a rickle of stones that ran around its circumference, and random piles of stone. There is a wonderful organic emergent quality to this place, and despites its final form being pre-destined like the movement of the sun, when you are in this place anything seems possible.

And there is no doubt that Arctic Henge is working hard to put Raufarhöfn on the map. The images of the gates (sometimes with northern lights) are well on the way to becoming iconic, a synecdoche for the monument as a whole (as with the Stonehenge trilithons). They appear in advertising for instance such as the cover of this brochure I picked up in Akureyri. And entry is free – I wonder if there are any plans to change this in the future?

And of course the monument features heavily in travel books and guides, such as the Atlas Obscura, and below there is an extract from a glossy but rather content-light guide book called Hidden Iceland (Michael Chapman, 2022); the description suggests the author did not actually visit. Then there is TripAdvisor (‘#1 of 7 things to do in Raufarhöfn’) with 45 reviews at the time of writing (27-01-23), only five of them Poor (“Bizarre pile of rocks” which is very similar to a few reviews I’ve read of actual Stonehenge!). This is a monument that is only going to get more visits in the future with the north coastal route of Iceland (Arctic Coast Way) now being marketed as an off-the-beaten track version of the more familiar A1 ring road route. It might even be reachable from cruise ships, which brings mixed blessings to megaliths in places like Orkney. The downside is that it is challenging to get to without a car.

Some folk will make the trek, and there they will find a relatively new megalithic monument in harmony with its environment and its community. This lovely A3 poster advertising the facilities of Raufarhöfn was freely available from the hotel reception and suggests, like many megalithic monuments, that it can add to a sense of pride in a place.

It reframes the view that I shared earlier, with the stone structures lying behind the town. Here, we have the town viewed almost through a megalithic prism, with the promise of an actual prism to come in the future.

It is not Stonehenge. It doesn’t look like Stonehenge. But it uses the -henge brand both for marketing but also to give a sense of what this place might be about. Some visitors might be left disappointed by the lack of Stonehengeiness of this place, while others will see it for what it is – a magical vision in stone.

It is not easy to get here, but by goodness it is worth it!

NB This is my third Iceland blog post – here are the others if you are interested:

Nothing BC (UP blog post 62)

An archaeology of artificial geysers (UP blog post 161)

Sources and acknowledgements: I would firstly like to state my admiration of Clonehenge as a project and concept, such a valuable and amazing resource! I would also like to thank Rebecca Younger, we have had a lot of henge conversations over the years. Sorry I got to Arctic Henge before you!! Photos with no credits were taken by Jan Brophy and I.

Source mentioned: Edensor, T & Smith, TSJ 2020 Commemorating economic crisis at a liminal site: memory, creativity and dissent at Achill Henge, Ireland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 38.3, 567-84 (if you want a pdf of this paper, email me! kenny.brophy@glasgow.ac.uk – as it is not open access).