Cup-Marked Stone: OS Grid Reference – SE 10614 46251
Also Known as:
- Carving 243 (Boughey & Vickerman)
Getting Here
The best description to get here is, from Ilkley, to go up Wells Road, over the cattle grid, and about 500 yards past the cattle grid take the left turn up Keighley Road. This becomes a truly dodgy dirt-track when you hit the road to the Silver Well cottage on your right, but keep going uphill for another after a short while, but keeping walking uphill for another 500 yards till you reach a good-sized footpath on your right. Walk along here for 50-60 yards and then walk into the vegetation on your right and, just a few yards along, you’ll see a good-sized elongated stone in front of you.
Archaeology & History
This large boulder has about nine cup-marked impressions, both on its eastern topmost part and others a few feet away on a lower south-facing section of the stone. But they’re not all man-made. The cups on the top-east surface are the ones we should be paying attention to. Of the three or four that we can see, at least two of them are man-made: it’s possible that all of them have been man-affected, but without a detailed geomorphological analysis, we’ll never know for sure. The cups and dips on the other, lower section of the rock are Nature’s handiwork. That doesn’t mean they had no importance in the overall mythic nature of the carving but, as with most British petroglyphs, we may never know one way or the other.
References:
- Boughey, Keith & Vickerman, E.A., Prehistoric Rock Art of the West Riding, WYAS: Wakefield 2003.
© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian
