York
Museum Stone Bronze Age Carved Rock (PRANYMROB2A*) York Museum Gardens OS Map Ref SE599522
OS Maps - Landranger 105 (York & Selby), Explorer 290 (York)
The York Museum
carved stone.
This piece of rock
art has somehow found its way into the gardens of York Museum where
it now stands alongside other unmarked rocks used as seats for unsuspecting
summer visitors to eat their picnics on. It is believed to have come from
the Robin Hood's Bay area some 60 miles away and was presented to the
York Philosophical Society in 1895 by a Canon Raines. As the exact location
of its find is unclear it is impossible to put the stone into any kind
of landscape context but many of the prehistoric barrows
and cairns
around the coast of North Yorkshire offer fines views out towards the
sea so it could be that this stone originally did too. The size and shape
of the block suggests it may have been cut from an earthfast panel when
it was removed from the moor rather than having formed a kerb stone or
cist
cover within a barrow.
The design itself consists of six cups
all with rings or penannulars, the central motif is the clearest and has
four penannulars plus a finely incised groove running out from the cup
towards the edge of the rock (the top edge in the image above) while three
other cups also appear to have slightly more worn shorter grooves running
out from their centres. The motif to the lower right has a cup and three
penannulars, the cups at the lower and top left corners each have a pair
of rings and the final two motifs near the left edge have a single penannular
each.
*Update: This stone is numbered ROB2A in Chappell & Brown's 'Prehistoric
Rock Art in the North York Moors' 2005 (PRANYM) and may have been one
of the stones that were removed from the Ravenscar area to the grounds
of what is now the Raven Hall Hotel before the collection was 'lost' for
over a hundred years (see also Ravenscar Carved
Rock). Well done to Graeme and Paul for some excellent detective work.
