Cochno Road druid stone at centre of battery storage battle

Part of the magic of these stones is their mystery. They are an enigma that has enchanted locals, visitors and archeologists.

Among those who know these neolithic sites best are residents of nearby Faifley, who grew up 'playing up the Druid stones'. The Clydebank village, parts of which are in the 10 % most deprived areas in Scotland, had an ancient wonderland nearby. 

But the man who has perhaps studied them most is Dr Kenny Brophy who for the last eight years has been examining between 12 and 15 boulders and outcrops, the best known of which is called simply the Cochno Stone. In that time, he says, “spent a lot of time looking at them and thinking about them.”

Campaigners from Save our Countryside - Cochno Road

What do we know about these stones and why people carved them?

“It’s really difficult,” said Dr Brophy, “to say much about them with a lot of certainty. Cup and ring stones are very difficult sites because they’re almost impossible to date. You can’t take a radiocarbon dating from a stone. But the belief is that they probably belong to the late neolithic period and may have been carved between 3000 and 2000 BC. They’re part of a broad tradition that’s found across North Western Europe and in really big concentrations in quite a few different parts of Scotland.”

Between 2500 and 3000 such sites have been identified across Scotland, and the symbols on the stone are very consistent. “They are," he observed, "cups which are circular hollows, quite small, and then some of them are surrounded by rings, concentric rings carved around them, so we tend to call them cup and ring mark stones.”

READ MORE: Cochno Road battery storage: Community fights green project

READ MORE: Banks Renewables plans Bathgate battery storage park

What do the markings mean?

That, said Dr Brophy, is the "million-dollar question".

“We don’t have a clue. It’s impossible to work out what the specific meaning was: whether they were part of a language and meant something specific or abstract symbols; related to trying to map out the landscape or the night sky; or territorial markers in some way. It’s impossible to tell because we are dealing with a society that left no written records.”

The symbols, he noted, are part of a worldview we no longer understand. “They are," he said, "very organic. They remind me of the ripples coming out when you drop a stone in a pond. The rock surfaces where there is a really good set of cup and ring marks almost look like water. There’s something about boundaries, thinking about the underworld and the real world – material boundaries in fluid stones."

Cup and ring marks on stone adjacent to planned battery site

How did they make them?

Neolithic people probably carved the rocks over extended periods, and it's believed some stones were carved again and again over centuries. Dr Brophy said: "Whoever was doing it was very good at it because they are incredibly difficult to do. To make the circles concentric. It was perhaps a skilled carving job and there were maybe only certain people in society who were able to do that.”

Do they have anything to do with druids?

No, said Dr Brophy. “Druids are more or less a modern invention. A few people I’ve spoken to recently have said when they were children they remember people up there dressed as druids carrying out ceremonies. I’ve no idea if that’s true or not. But it's quite a common association with ancient monuments to call a stone circle a 'druid circle'."

Where do the stones tend to be?

The stones, Dr Brophy observed, are quite often in quite prominent places in the landscape. Those around Faifley are well placed, usually with fantastic views down over the Clyde valley. He said, "They're usually in the kind of places in the landscape where prehistoric farmers would have been spending the summer with their animals. They probably lived down by the Clyde and brought their animals to breed on the uplands in the summer. 

Archeologists at the Cochno Stone (Image: Kenny Brophy)

How significant are the stones at Cochno?

The main Cochno stone is one of the biggest sites in Scotland, a huge sandy outcrop, fifteen metres across, covered in prehistoric symbols and densely carved. It is, said Dr Brophy, “probably one of the most significant examples in Britain".

"This is why, he added, "it’s important to the local community because it’s got a very rich history of engagement with the local people."

“They’ve got all these stories about people playing on it when they were children – games of marbles where they were getting the marbles to stay in the cups. It’s got this kind of rich modern biography which means that the Cochno stone in particular is really important to people who live in Faifley."

What do the stones mean to locals?

Lucy Jordan, who lives near the site, recalled running and playing “freely” around the sites during her childhood and that it was referred to as 'playing up the Druid Stones'. “I remember used to sit under a tree overhanging one of the stones/boulders, dropping my wee marble in the ring and watching it circle round.”

Margaret Hamilton, a key voice in the campaign against the battery storage site, also has strong memories. She said: "I’ve spent all my living life growing up in this area built dens playing games in the ferns when I was a kid with the others of our area. We all would sit on the area of the stone it was like our own magical place where our imagination would excel. You could say walking into Narnia!”

Campaigners from Save Our Countryside - Cochno Road

How connected is the community to the stones?

When Dr Brophy carried out fieldwork local people helped with the excavations and with recording the sites. Though Faifley isn’t often seen as deprived by outsiders, he pointed out, it has a “rich prehistoric heritage which people locally are very aware of and very proud of”.

Such is that connection that a new primary school campus in the village is set to have rock art design integrated into it.

“The rock art," said Dr Brophy, "is really embedded within the identity of a lot of the people that live in the community. It’s unusual in Scotland to have people in an urban area who are that closely associated with their prehistoric heritage.”

How seriously are the stones under threat from this development?

Locals are worried and upset, but Dr Brophy reassured that there is plenty of “statutory protection for all archeological sites within the planning process”.

"We’ve got very robust planning procedures in place in Scotland where archeology is concerned," he said. "So nothing will happen without archeologists being consulted in the process.”

Apatura, the company developing the battery storage site, told the Herald: “The scheme will not impact upon any known historic or archaeological features. A Historic Environment Assessment has been undertaken by an independent third-party specialist and has been submitted in support of the application. This assessment will be considered by the Energy Consents Unit and Local Planning Authorities as a material planning consideration in the determination of application.”