Rough Holden CR-7, Silsden, West Yorkshire

Cup-and-Ring Stone:  OS Grid Reference – SE 06918 45020

Getting Here

Rough Holden Cup-and-Ring Stone

Another carving that might take a bitta finding.  Follow the same directions for reaching the Holden Buttock Stone, going past it towards the fence 100 yards away.  Go through the gate and walk along the path for a couple of hundred yards.  As you walk down, you’ll eventually see the cluster of rocks amidst which lives the Dump Stone carving.  This, the Rough Holden cup-and-ring, is off the path (right) before you get to them in the grasses.  Look around.

Archaeology & History

Rediscovered in June 2009 by Michala Potts and I, this little stone at first only appeared to possess a few cup-markings, but the more we looked at it, the more obvious it became that one of the cups had a nice ring surrounding it.  Unfortunately this didn’t come out at all well in any of the photos we took, so we need to another visit here whe the sunlight’s right to get a decent image.  Aswell as that, the drawing we did of the basic design appears to be missing what looks another blatant cup-marking near the centre of the rock, which did not seem at all obvious to the naked eye when we found it. (such are the delights of assessing cup&rings!)

Rough Holden cup-marks
Rough Holden cup-marks
First sketch of the stone
Basic sketch of the stone

The main cluster of cups occurs on the northern-edge of the stone, where a couple of them seem linked by linear features.  There are also what may be a cup or three on the vertical edge of the rock, below these cups – but this needs looking at again the better lighting.   The cup-and-ring is very faint, but once noticed it become increasingly obvious that it’s there, and most of the ring can be traced with ease by running one’s finger along the groove.  Mikki reckons the ring runs all the way round the cup (she’s probably right), where as I could only work it out running 75% of the way round.  The line which runs off above the ring seems to link up with what looks like another obvious cup-marking on the photo.  We’ll have to check it out properly next time we’re up there!

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian


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5 thoughts on “Rough Holden CR-7, Silsden, West Yorkshire”

  1. Excellent stuff Paul & Mikki – ‘jer reckon from the number of new finds (bloody excellent for one days wanderings)that this west facing area of Rombalds has been devoid of mass fribbling by rock-botherers?

  2. Richard darlingz!
    Glad you like the new finds! I’ve gotta be honest: we took a wander up here to see if some of the carvings I drew in some of mi old notebooks of the Robin Hood’s Wood region were real, or the product of my overactive teenage imagination. Not quite sure why, but I more expected the carvings to be just natural-marks on the rocks. Thankfully my teenage findings were actually correct! There is one carving though, which sticks in mi head and which I’ve a decent drawing of from 1980, showing a quite linear sequence of cups, linked by single lines, that was on a small rock in the same region as the ones highlighted here. We didn’t find it, so we’re gonna go back up in the next week or so, get a rubbing of one or 2 of the carvings we’ve found (where it seems there’s more than we originally thought on the rock surface) and see if we can isolate those that I marked on my 1979 map & notebook of the area. Some of the grasslands have been overturned with a new track and other workings – but I reckon there’s gonna be two or three more hiding in the shrubbery! There’s certainly another coupla dozen in the Rivock woods area that aint in any of the textbooks – but I last saw them just a few months before they planted the forest and reckon it’ll be years before they re-emerge!
    Cheers – Paul

  3. By eck fella – a couple of dozen!! A crying shame GPS wasn’t around ‘int olden days like:) By the way, I emailed TNA page links for your finds through to Keith Boughey for ref. Apparently, a researcher called David Bateman has also been traipsing around the Rough Holden area & found others – Keith thinks yours are additional though.

    rich

  4. Have y’ got any details/images/OS-coordinates of Dave Bateman’s carvings? Or p’raps his email? We’re up Holden again this week, so we’ll check ’em out and add them here in the weeks to come.

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