Drumtroddan Cup and Ring Marked Rocks

Near Drumtroddan Farm, outside Port William in the Machars, three groups of rock outcrops are carved with prehistoric cup-and-ring marks made between about 3500 and 1000 BC. Two groups lie in fenced enclosures in pasture near the farm and a third in a small copse. The carvings are simple cups, or cups ringed by up to six concentric circles, some with gaps, up to about 40 centimetres across, several joined by grooves, all cut with hard stone tools. Similar rock art is found in north-east England, Ireland, Brittany and north-west Spain, and more than a hundred theories try to explain it, from maps to territorial markers and beliefs; nobody knows who made them or why. They lie near the Drumtroddan Standing Stones and may be of the same date. Reviewers park in the farmyard and leave a small donation in the honesty pot, then follow signs through a cattle field that can be muddy. Several find the marks faint and overgrown.