Monday, August 17th, 2009
Musician and amateur archeologist George Currie has found a large group of cup and ring marks carved on a stone in Perthshire. The stone carvings could date to anywhere between 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.
The cup and ring style is well known in Scotland — George Currie himself has come across several hundred — but this stone has almost 90 carvings on it, an unusually voluminous collection.
Some of the cups have rings around them and a number of linear grooves can also be seen, with some still showing the individual blows of craftsmens’ tools.
Mr. Currie found the stone on land overseen by the National Trust of Scotland, so he sent them GPS co-ordinates of the find as soon as he made it.
Nobody knows what the markings mean or even if they stand for anything in particular.
NTS archeologist for the west of Scotland Derek Alexander said there was a great interest in cup and ring marks.
“There is always going to be a debate about what these things mean.
“They seem to lie on boundaries, so they could be a way to place people in a location. There are also suggestions they are maps of the stars, maps of burial grounds or tribal symbols.”