lethargic_man | In search of Neolithic rock carvings, and other tales of the sixth day of Pesach

It being a nice day on Sunday, my parents and I headed out into the Northumbrian countryside in search of the Stone Age. They had seen on a programme that rock carvings had been found in a field near somewhere called Glantlees (geographical context) a few years ago, and wanted to have a look themselves. They had a map printed off the Internet, but no GPS receiver; so what we ended up doing was tramping off into the field and heading off hopefully towards the stone outcropping near the top of the hill.

Having failed to find anything more than lichen anywhere there, we then tried our luck on a second outcropping that had come into view around the curve of the hill as we approached the first. And then we tried a third outcropping that had come into view as we approached the second, and so on.

An hour later, having gone over every outcropping in the field, we had discovered a series of circles carved into the stone, each with a hole marking the centre point, and also a series of concentric circles:

We could only find a fraction of the number of carvings shown on the map—but not the more interesting shapes my parents had seen on the telly, so off we went to the other side of the Millstone Burn in search of the other dots on the map. Here there were no stone outcroppings, just loose basalt boulders dropped there by the retreating glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age.

Several of these featured multiple parallel grooves, which we took for geological strata until we found one rock with two sets of grooves at different angles, one set overriding and obliterating the other. This gave my father the insight to identify these as the result of the boulders being dragged over the bedrock by glaciers.

Here we had even less success than before, though we did encounter an odd carving that looks like it could even have been writing:

If so, this would, of course, date from much later than the other carvings, which, though they are very hard to date (my father quoted anything between three thousand and ten thousand years old), are probably the oldest man-made artefacts I've seen (with the possible exception of the Carmel Caves in Israel, site of various finds dating back to the first modern humans to leave Africa, 120,000 years ago, but I can't remember what I actually saw there).

My parents had also seen a section, on the BBC series "Coast", on the identification and reconstruction of a Neolithic house, the oldest known house in this part of the world, at Howick, and, based on this, my father was able to recognise two Neolithic houses next to each other in our rock-strewn field. Each consisted of a raised ring of earth with a gap in the leeward direction. The ring of earth would have post-holes in it, where wooden poles were inserted to make a teepee overlaid with earth on a lattice of twigs.

We went to have a look at the BBC's reconstructed Neolithic house that afternoon. There was a plaque up in front of it, and leaflets about it at the tourist information place, but the house itself has been reduced to a complete wreck in the three or four years since it was built. Seems no one has taken the trouble to maintain it, which was rather sad as it was a minor tourist attraction (and the council had taken the trouble to print all the leaflets).

Along the way, we stopped off at Barter Books in Alnwick, where my parents got the secondhand Compact Edition OED they got me for my birthday a few years ago. (The Compact Edition is the one with all n volumes compressed into two physical volumes by dint of very small print.) The bookshop is absolutely huge—it occupies the (entirety of) the old railway station (and there's a little model train running along a track above the books), but much, I suspect, to livredor and rysmiel's disgust, I didn't buy anything there. It was, in a way, too big, because you couldn't take the whole place in at a single sweep, but also in a way too small, because (even though it had 300,000 books) it wasn't big enough to have the hard-to-come-by books I was after. When you're searching for something in particular (rather than just browsing), usedbooksearch is generally better.