Stone 9

Most of the "megalith" records for Britain in the Atlas come from the Scottish register of monuments, and many are not standing stones at all but carved rocks. Cup and ring marks are a form of prehistoric art found along the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, in Ireland, Wales, northern England, Scotland, Brittany, Portugal and Galicia. They consist of a concave depression no more than a few centimetres across, pecked into a rock surface and often surrounded by concentric circles; sometimes a linear channel, called a gutter, leads out from the middle. They occur as petroglyphs on natural boulders and outcrops, and also as an element of megalithic art on worked stones, such as the slab cists of the Food Vessel culture, some stone circles and passage graves, and the capstones at Newgrange. The regional background, “Prehistoric rock art and standing stones of Scotland”, is given below.

No scientific date has been published for this site. Monuments of this type in United Kingdom are generally dated 4000 BCE to 2400 BCE; the site itself may fall inside or outside that range.

Megalithic construction in England is placed at c. 4000 BC; the first henges in Britain appear c. 3000 BC and hundreds of smaller stone circles were built c. 2400 BC.