Lochmaloney, Kilmany, Fife

Cup-and-Ring Stone (destroyed):  OS Grid Reference – NO 379 204

Archaeology & History

The long-gone Lochmaloney carving

Here’s another old carving that has succumbed to the lack of animistic respect endemic in modern culture.  Ronald Morris (1981) reported that this carved rounded boulder was “dynamited by the farmer and (is) now no longer extant.”  First described in 1872 and later included in the Fife Inventory (1935), the large smooth rock used to lay within a nice copse of dense gorse, measuring 2½m x 1¾m across and about 1m high from ground level.  Morris described the petroglyphs as follows:

“2 cups-and-one-complete ring (one mostly weathered off), diameters 10cm (4in) and 27 cups (carving depth and angle of slope not now known.”

Its isolation from any other known petroglyphs is a little odd and there is every possibility is accompanied a prehistoric burial of some sort; although from the attitude of the farmer, all trace of that would have gone too.

References:

  1. Morris, Ronald W.B., The Prehistoric Rock Art of Southern Scotland, BAR: Oxford 1981.
  2. Royal Commission on Ancient & Historical Monuments, Scotland, Eleventh Report with Inventory of Monuments and Constructions in the Counties of Fife, Kinross and Clackmannan, HMSO: Edinburgh 1935.

© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian


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