Maarten van Hoek The Geography of Cup-and-Ring ... - StoneWatch

The situation in the study area differs, however, from the Australian
example in that in the Kilmartin area intervisibility is not consistently
applied all along the route. Some instances may even have developed
accidentally. Furthermore, intervisibility in the study area concerns
more the locations than the carved rocks themselves because the
distances between the sites are greater. In Galloway and in north
England, where many distinctly developed linear groups occur,
intervisibility also more than often concerns general locations, not the
actual carved rocks. We shall see that at the rock art clusters in the
Tayside Region, central Scotland, it even seems as if intervisibility has
been avoided on purpose.
A firm relationship by way of intervisibility between fixed rock art
sites and menhirs in the study area could not be established. None of
the complex rock art sites, except for Ballygowan 1 (and perhaps
Poltalloch 2), and surprisingly also very few simple sites include any
view of the two major megalithic settings in the study area. This lack
of correspondence between fixed rock art sites and megaliths is
confirmed in other areas. There are even rock art regions where only a
few (or no) menhirs occur. The rock art region of Galloway on the south
coast of Scotland for instance, having the most dense concentration of
open-air rock art sites in these isles, has only ten standing stones and
none bears any decoration, whereas a row of three prominent menhirs
at Drumtroddan, said to be aligned on Mid Winter Sunset over a small
island in the Irish Sea, is very close to an important open-air rock art
complex. The Drumtroddan menhirs seem to be part of a line of
standing stones guiding the traveller inland from the possible landing
place at Monreith Bay to the megalithic complex at Torhousekie, rather
than being associated with open-air rock art distribution.
This resembles the situation at Dunamuck in our study area (Fig. 14)
where a line of standing stones leads the traveller via the southern
entrance to the megalithic complexes in the Kilmartin Valley, whereas
the rock art led the earlier traveller into the valley of the river Add.
Only one of the menhirs leading into the Kilmartin valley bears one
single cupmark, regarded by some as even doubtful.
It is also clear that it has certainly not become a widespread tradition
in the British Isles to decorate menhirs. Only approximately 100 of the
originally thousands of menhirs of the British Isles are decorated with
Neolithic rock art motifs, mainly with some simple cupules. Excluded
here are stones in circles, although it proves that cupmarked stones in
some Scottish circles indeed do occupy astronomical positions (Burl
1976; see also Beltany).
We may also conclude that decoration was hardly used in the late
Neolithic and early Bronze Age “observatories”. Most of the stone
settings with possible solar or lunar lines do not feature any decoration
at all. It even proves to be quite an exception when a decorated stone
M. van HOEK: 31
GEOGRAPHY