A bit about us

                   by

         Jan Brouwer

                                                           

After a survey at Buttony, Northumberland, in 2002. Gus is on the left.



We are often asked why and how we got involved in this subject. So here is our story.

As a born Frisian (a province in the North of the Netherlands with their own language and culture), I became interested in the so called "Terpen"-culture. Terpen are man-made mounds in the flat landscape used to live on, seeking protection from the incoming sea. They start building these mounds in the Iron Age, ±600BC, until about 1000AD when English monks, helped by local farmers, started to build dikes.

Around 1800AD, the fertile soil of the mounds was sold to other parts of Holland. By digging the soil away, it became clear that the terpen were in fact an archaeological picture-book with thousands of layered finds from the Iron-Age to the Roman, Medieval and modern period.

   

What happened in the rest of Europe when the Frisians tried to keep their feet dry on their mounds? The emerge of the Celts! The culture and amazing art of this people became my next hobby. The Celts swarmed off to the far corners of the continent. When they arrived in the UK and Ireland, they found megalithic structures as passage-graves, standing stones and stone circles. They used this features for their own belief and rituals.

And there was my third hobby; stone circles! During vacations with the family, I visited a lot of locations and enjoyed their settings in connection with the surrounding landscape. I set-up a database and started to collect publications about the subject.

   

It was in 1991 when I noticed prehistoric rock art for the first time. It was at "Balnuaran of Clava", the cairns near Inverness in Scotland. Man-made cups and even a cup-and-ring in a stone; a real "sign" of live! From then on my main interest was: prehistoric rock art! In 1993, I photographed the Drumtroddan motifs in Wigtownshire (Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland) and was really "hooked".

In 1998, an year after my retirement from the Royal Dutch Navy, I made my first Rock Art field trip and came back with a lot of impressions, photos, slides, sketches and notes. There was no way back.

The hobby became -and still is- a passion!    

Since then I make regular trips to the UK accompanied by my good friend Gus van Veen. I know him for more than 40 years! He was the director of a paper-factory but suffered a brain-stroke in 1997. And although he still has some difficulties with his speech, he is a keen observer and a great companion on our trips to the UK.

 

We've visited more than 300 rock art locations. We met friendly and helpful people (farmers, landowners and other locals) and made a lot of friends. In June 2001 we started our groups-website "Rock Art in the British Landscape". The main goal of the website was to make prehistoric, non-figurative rock art in Great-Britain perceptible to everyone who is interested and to share ideas about these enigmatic signs of a lost message. Despite the nearly 200 members and over 55.000 page views, we decided to terminate the free groups-site by the end of 2006 due to nasty limitations. RABL belongs already to the rock art history.

   

We consider good photography of the rock-art sites our core business. That's why we started the photo website British Rock Art Collection in June 2005. With the contribution of many good rock art friends, the website covers over 1000 rock art locations in the British Islands. With over 350.000 photo hits in the summer of 2009, the website proofs to be a success. The back-up of our site is formed by a digital data-bank with over 2500 records, a photo archive with thousands of images and an extensive rock art library.


We are just amateurs but fully dedicated to the course of Britain's prehistoric rock art, especially in connection with the surrounding landscape. After all it is not a big deal; Terpen-culture, Celts, Stone circles, Rock Art!
Just pick-up another book or travel in another direction.

   

We try to keep-up with the latest studies in this field. But most of all we enjoy the motifs for what they are: signs of ancient live, in the most beautiful places in the landscape. We invite you to share this pleasure with us.


 


Any questions and/or remarks? We love to hear from you!

 
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