Cupped Dolmen in Wales

One begins to understand that rocks are not nouns, but verbs — physical evidence of processes…  —Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness 

Dolmen near the Irish Sea on the Llŷn peninsula  

This cromlech near Clynnog Church in Carnarvonshire has nothing very remarkable about it, except that the upper face of the covering-stone, measuring eight feet by five feet eight inches, is covered with small artificial hollows, apparently placed without any attempt at order.  These markings are of more or less simple character. The most simple, and perhaps the oldest, form are the small cup-shaped hollows placed either in symmetrical order or scattered promiscuously. It may also be considered remarkable that the hollows are on the upper, not the under, side of the covering-slab. 

— E. L. Barnwell, from “Marked Stones in Wales,” Archacologia Cambrensis, April 1867.

Half a mile to the south-west of the village of Clynnog Fawr, stands near the sea a cromlech, consisting of a capstone and four props. This cromlech is described, under date 1772, in the old Rhyl MSS., compiled by the Rev. J. Llwyd, of Caerwys, as having upon its capstone "near a hundred shallow cavities running in oblique but almost parallel lines along, its surface, three much larger than the rest in a triangular position; it is supported by four strong bearers, and in length four cubits, in breadth three, its inclination towards the setting sun." 

—Sir James Y. Simpson, in Archaic Sculpturings of Cups, Circles… (1867) Included the above image, a plate lithograph from a sketch by Dr Hughes of Llanwrst, Wales.

Looking SE from the dolmen: left, Gyrn Goch and Gyrn Ddu, Right in the distance, the striking trio of hills known in English as the 'Rivals'. At 564 m, the central, Garn Ganol is the highest in the Llŷn peninsula; to the north-west, Garn Fôr (444 m), to the south-east, Tre'i Ceiri — with its extensive hillfort — at 485 m.

This cromlech (the Welsh word for dolmen aka burial tomb) is well-known as the Bachwen Dolmen, an easy walk from Clynnog Fawr, on the western edge of Llŷn peninsula. The Neolithic dolmen is unique in Wales for its capstone with the numerous (promiscuous!) carved cupules. Pictures, comments and documentation can be found via the internet. 
Color photos: Douglas Beauchamp, May 2025.

FELDSPAR :: EARTH DAY

The earth as it has always been
is saying it's goodbyes. Another world
will overrun the emptiness,
but I love this one.
— Chase Twichell

Time collapses. This basalt is different. Harder. Darkly brown. Rounded water-smoothed boulders thick with feldspar crystals sparkling in the desert air.  Petroglyphs emerge ghost-like, yearning, dissolve as the light shifts, from 3000 ybp +/- 2500 years.

Coarse-grained, plagioclase porphyritic basalt, boulders rounded from millennia under the lake's Pleistocene high-stands, a southwest edge the multi-layered Columbia River Flood Basalt Province.

Along US Highway 395 north to Canada south to California 19th century geographic imaginings. Margins alive. Lichen cattle shrimp avocets bighorn. Saltcrusts fences bones placed stones. Wave cut road cut clay bed tar bed.

Lake Abert. Pleistocene Lake Chewaican remnant, a very near blurred future-time collides toward this place. Too soon geo-logically: a stark dry slope, a dusty valley. Asphalt road bed black cracking tilting sliding into white salt. Trace chemicals congeal and bind the changing times. Patina darkens petroglyphs rock circles stacked walls. Wind carries the sparklings the longing crystals on through the curve of time.

NOTES
—  Earth Day.  Consider: Plagioclase is also a major constituent of rock in the highlands of the Earth's moon. Analysis of thermal emission spectra from the surface of Mars suggests that plagioclase is the most abundant mineral in the crust of Mars.
— Plagioclase: from the Greek plagios - "oblique" and klao - "I cleave" in allusion to the obtuse cleavage angles of the good cleavages.
— Chase Twichell, from her poem Touch-me-not in The Ghost of Eden (1995)

CODA
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025):   I chose rabbits as an art icon because there is a cultural universality to them throughout the world. Standing rabbits not only appear in petroglyphs in the Americas, but in petrogylphs around the world as well. In educational institutions in this country, reference is often made to the age of America as being two hundred years or five hundred years, but because we still live under the aegis of colonial thinking, its never taken into consideration that some of the world's greatest cultures and cities were here in the Americas for thousands of years—and are still here. (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2002)
Artwork:  The Long Shadow (2013), woodcut

BASALT::High Lakes

Three following photos, details of above

Below, detail of above

Below, detail of above

Photos: Selections of petroglyphs carved-abraded-pecked-incised on an east-facing rim of fractured basalt located in what-is-now Lake County, Oregon — high lakes country east of Warner Basin. These petroglyphs, as with the thousand of others in this region, placed-made during seasonal rounds, crossing boundaries over incalculable centuries.

Looking is not seeing; seeing not knowing. Time elides moments; layers confound time. Present in parallel universes — who are you?

TUFF :: Tule Lake

Time thins.   Memory serves the mirage.

A cliff wall of tuff. Volcanic cone erupted underwater 250,000 or so years ago under the ancient endorheic basin now known as Tule Lake. Terminus of the expansive watershed nourishing Lost River. In turn, nourishing the Modocs in their ancestral territories for thousands of years.

This tumultuous country now sliced by an unwavering geopolitical line, the Oregon-California boundary. In the 19th century this line demarcated a transgressive often violent zone of difference. The Modoc peoples subjugated, displaced, often killed. Gold-seekers, militia, US Army, Wasco scouts hired from Warm Springs reservation, and would be railroaders-turned-ranchers-turned judge and boss.

How do these thousands of rock cut markings gazed at by the modern drive-up viewer align with colonial claiming and naming?  What can we ask that comes close to empathy and release?  

Petroglyphs carved through several millennia now easily accessed and viewed in a protected section of the Lava Beds National Monument:  Petroglyph Point.

 

CODA
… Forgotten now forgetting, no
more the absent-minded in full preoccupation
with the ten thousand things, each separate,
each needing its own space and unique memory.
Years seem to have gone by in this forgetting.
Do thousand lives have to be wasted now
to sharpen this one life? But all the lives
return again into the picture as sun wills me
to wither down to a last flare of love.
—Nathanial Tarn from the poem Recollection of Being

MARBLE

we live in narrow realms

by necessity

by chance

by the unthought will of an unknown star

Petroglyphs carved into marble in the now of millennia. Peoples living, moving, north south east west.  In the eastern shadows and waters of the Sierras west of Death Valley.  Many carvings destroyed in the white settler era by mining the marble stone.  Thought gestures of exacting desire — carving, mining — an extraction, intention, abandon.  Dust and starry skies prevail.

 

TUFA

Tufas, like mineral flowers, emerge, protrude, and fragment as a lake recedes.  Bud, blossom, seed, left high and dry.  Tufas congeal in crenate patterns, constellated, crystallized, caverned, calcified froth. 

This tufa boulder formed under the waters of a bay of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan in northwest Nevada.  An immersed spring emits dissolved calcium which combines with carbon in the lake water to form calcium carbonate into a sort of crystalline structure, which is then eroded. These deeply carved petroglyphs, vulva-like shapes and linear incisings, are undated.

The petroglyphs on this boulder appear as emblems of desire, as invocations, perhaps entreating sexual fecundity, necessary replenishment. In these landscapes as marvelous, saturated dream-space, I am reminded of Max Ernst’s frottages and textured paintings.  

The boulders' location is proximate to the justly famous, oldest dated petroglyphs in North America, also carved on tufa. Those dated petroglyphs look to the east over Winnemucca Dry Lake, east of Pyramid Lake - both remnant lakes of pluvial Lake Lahontan. The Winnemucca petroglyphs were determined by Larry Benson and associates in 2013 to date to at least 10,500 years ago.

 

Another carved tufa boulder near the spring.

A very hot spring, once at the bottom of a pluvial (Pleistocene) lake, located on the playa near the tufa boulders.

CODA
We all belong not just to our present moment, nor to the place in which we find ourselves at that moment, but to a far greater system of changes which have occurred throughout Earth's history and will continue to occur long into the future. The present convulsions of the planet are the result of the whole Earth system trying, in response to terrible pressures, to shift itself, often violently, into a new set of alignments, and we are part of those changes. We are the weather, and the water; we are the lionfish, too, changing our environment as we are changed by it. This realization can be humbling. and it can be hopeful too. We belong to the whole timescale of history. —James Bridle, from Here Come The Lionfish,  Emergence Magazine, Vol. 5: Time (2024)

Below: Max Ernst: The Gray Forest (1927)