Hiking on Ilkley Moor on a cloudy, overcast freezing day in January. Solo.
January is the colour grey. The sparkling, cosy, fire glowing festivities of Christmas and the fireworks of new year have gone, and what is left is cold, hard stone, short days which fall through your numb fingers and overcast skies, full of rain, waiting to pour. We’ve passed through from one age to another over a threshold of granite. I’ve come north looking for rocks and there’s no shortage of them on Ilkley Moor. I’m looking for carved rocks and there’s no shortage of these either. In fact Ilkley Moor has more human carving on it than anywhere I’ve seen for a long while. For over four thousand years people have been making their mark on the granite; four thousand years of recording in stone. It’s a truly astounding heritage, I wonder why I was never taught about it. I grew up twenty miles from here, just twenty short miles from one of the most prolific sites for neolithic and bronze age stone carving in the UK but no one ever thought to mention it or persuade me of the magic that might be up there. There’s even a Roman high road leading from one to the other. Perhaps it’s better that way, that I have to find these things for myself. I probably wouldn’t have listened back then. Every day of the year I select a photo for my online diary, and when I skim through to see how January looks, January is grey. But there are more colours on the moor than I imagined on the train here. The fires aren’t cold, there are embers waiting to be rekindled.
Ilkley is a lovely town, all honeyed sandstone and civic buildings blackened by the Industrial Revolution, which feel so familiar and full of West Yorkshire nostalgia. My family lived their lives in a short radius of here, apart from the gypsies of course. My grandad probably built several of the Ilkley buildings but he’s no longer here to ask and if he was he’d have claimed he built all of them. From the top of the moor you can probably see his house. I walk up the steep Cowpasture Lane from the station and am surprised how the town and the moor rub so closely together. I step through an iron gate from one to the other, past the dog walkers and joggers, and I’m on the moor.
The air is perishingly cold and catches my breath and nips at my face, but the sound of the birds from the trees along the moor’s edge stay with me for a while as I ascend. It’s a strange feeling to stand gazing down at the town, so close I could hurl a stone at it, then turn my back and be miles away in time and place. I have a rough and approximate map which has marked on it Cup & Ring Marked Rocks all over Ilkley and Rombalds Moor, technically Ilkley Moor is just a small part of the other. Rombald was a giant who would fight with his giant wife, both would rage and stomp across the moorland, angrily stamping on one huge rock which split in two seperating the Cow from its Calf, or so the story goes. So of course I’m making my way first to Cow and Calf rocks, a big blue star on the OS map.
Just before it, I find my first cup and ring marks, pecked into the rock formation thousands of years ago. Weathering has smoothed out the deeply incised contours of these petroglyphs but over Britain and Ireland, in little pockets of upland, there can sometimes be seen these strange shapes cut deep into the gritstone. No one really knows what they may have represented and there are many theories. There is some evidence, particularly as the carvings became more elaborate with time, that they are connected to the stars, sun and moon, a celestial marking of time or sky map, but it’s still only a theory. Others have speculated they could mark the boundaries of territory, with symbols of kinship or clan. There is also a theory that the circles, spirals, ladders and hollows mark some kind of map or journey. It’s a very seductive idea, particularly if you have ever looked at the dreamtime drawings (maps) of First Nations people of Australia. As I stared for ages in the British Museum at some of these artworks I had a strong sense of the similarity of shapes and movement, but perhaps that’s what I wanted to see.
The real expert in the field was autodidact Stan Beckensall who has written several books on British rock art, detailing the forms and their development over time and geography. But so far in the past is it, and with a paucity of other archeological evidence, that their meaning is now lost to us and perhaps we have to be comfortable simply not knowing.
The first rock I come to is large enough to walk across and the symbols, although hard to photograph are easy to see if you know what to look for. The Ilkley petroglyphs include cups (deeply incised holes or bowls), rings (concentric circles, spirals and mazes) rarer ladders (lines and ovals with ‘rungs’) as well as whorls, loops, connecting lines and a range of other symbols. There are over 400 of them and aside from a handful they are notoriously hard to locate, even with grid references. I seem to have the place to myself so I stare at them for a while and move on to Cow and Calf. It’s here there is another interesting juxtaposition. Cow and Calf is absolutely covered in rock carving, but from the seventeen and eighteen hundreds. Names and dates are cut into the stone all over and of course I cannot help wondering whether it is a uniquely human condition that we want to leave our legacy etched into the landscape for eternity, that we want to be remembered and what better way to do it than cut ourselves deep into the rock.
It also makes me muse when does rock art become graffiti, and is there any distinction between the two. These are just a couple of hundred years old but already they seem amazing to me. What is it in me that I find carving by seemingly random people in public places so endlessly fascinating, whether it is rock art, medieval church and secular building graffiti, masons marks in a saxon crypt or apotropaic marks across lintels, fireplaces, windows, pews and walls. I think it’s because I’m reaching back in history and meeting the ancestors, it’s the closest I can ever get to real people, living their real lives, undistinguished and unrecorded in the history books. People perhaps like me, making their mark on the world.
I follow my instincts and roam across the moor over several miles. Some of the petroglyphs are easy enough to find, some I struggle to locate in a mass of impressive looking boulders. I found some grid references for the more well known stones and after a while I find myself knowing the kind of location to find one, I’m trying to think like a neolithic or bronze age person but of course the trees and landscape would be quite different. The moor has pines and swathes of gorse and bracken over it, it would be next to impossible to find the off-the-beaten-track ones in summer and several times I’m following barely discernable tracks in the bracken and bog. I don’t know enough to guess what the topography would have been like 4000 years ago and it’s hard to know what the climate was like when they were made, it’s so hard to date the stones with accuracy.
With an overcast sky and no shadows it can be hard to make out some of them, my images don’t do them justice. a winter’s day with a low sun, and frost which snaps would be perfect, but we must make do with what we have. I’m enjoying the red bracken and the moss and lichen, some of which can be as old as the hills. Eventually I find myself on the Dales High Way. I often end up here without aiming for it. Perhaps someone is trying to tell me something. But it’s time to head back down into the warm sandstone of Ilkley, and find that little independent book shop which has been here for years and has a book I can’t buy elsewhere. Back to the land of the living just over the edge there.
My last stone doesn’t want to be found and I am running out of time. One day isn’t long enough, I have barely scratched the surface. A scratch leaves no trace up here, you need time to make an impression, if you want to leave a mark, in your memory or on the rocks. I hunt around in a cluster of large boulders, imagining shapes and lines that aren’t there, but I can’t find it and I’m distracted by the practicalities of life. After ten minutes I give up but I’m far from disheartened. It means I have to come back and look again and look for more. There are so many marked on the map and I can see my route has barely left an impression on the expanse of Rombald’s Moor. I am already looking forward to coming back. January may be rock and stone but grey is my favourite colour.
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With an OS map I wandered, and some GPS coordinates available from The Friends of Ilkley Moor.
This week I have been reading
Ancient British Rock Art: A Guide to Indigenous Stone Carvings by Chris Mansell. The fabulous bookshop in Ilkley is called The Grove, which I strongly recommend you visit.
Walking Away 
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