NGR: SE 5996 5209. In the Yorkshire Museum Gardens, on Museum Street, at York, North Yorkshire, there’s a very nice cup-and-ring marked stone with well-defined carvings (petroglyphs) that date from the Bronze Age. There were originally two carved stones here, but the other one has been lost; the other stones alongside (which people sit on) are not of any real interest. This rectangular block/slab of stone stands beneath a tree at the side of one of the main footpaths at the southwest side of the Yorkshire Museum. There are at least six small cups and a number of concentric circles, and one connecting groove carved on this rough hewn slab of stone. However, there is much uncertainty as to just where the stone came from. Some think it came from a larger block of rock on the north York Moors, to the north of Whitby, while another thinks that it came from the Ravenscar area on the east Yorkshire coast. Could it have come from a cist grave on the moors? And why, and how, did it come to be in the museum gardens at York? At least a couple of these questions cannot really be answered with any great certainty.

Having probably been hewn from a larger rock-face somewhere above Robin Hood’s Bay, or from the Ravenscar area, on the East Yorkshire coast in the late 19th Century – the stone was presented to the York Philosophical Society, who in turn in I would imagine, gave it to the Yorkshire Museum. But the carving should really be undercover inside the museum. There are six small cup-markings with several concentric rings around each of them, and the middle carving, which has four rings, has a groove running to the edge of another ring (where there is a break in the stone) and then out to the edge of the stone itself,  and there looks to be another ‘possible’ (shorter) groove running from a cup-mark and then out to the edge.  So, all-in-all, this is a very interesting panel of rock-art. The stone is also numbered ROB2A in Chappell & Brown’s ‘Prehistoric Rock Art in the North York Moors’ 2005 (PRANYM), according to the excellent website: stone circles.org.uk. See their website link, below.

Source / References & Related Websites:-

Photo is courtesy of Patrick John Leonard. Many thanks Patrick.

http://www.stone-circles.org.uk/stone/yorkmuseum.htm  

https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=16935  

https://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/7246/york_museum_gardens.html    

http://secretyork.com/tag/neolithic/

© Ray Spencer, The Journal of Antiquities, 2020.