Stan Beckensall's archive of over 1500 panels of rock art in Northumberland is once more available online.
Dr Aron Mazel, Abigail Cheverst and Dylan Graham have worked voluntarily over the last year to access the original archive and reinstate access through the design of a new website. The new website features full access to the original archive with extensive search functionality as well as interfacing with navigational software to provide directions to sites. There is also a personal dashboard function which allows the saving of personal collections and sites.
In 1966, Dr Stan Beckensall (1932-2025) encountered rock art in the United Kingdom at Old Bewick, in north Northumberland, for the first time. This set in motion a remarkable 60-year rock art journey, which included recording rock art in Northumberland and in other parts of the United Kingdom. In all, Stan recorded about 1500 panels by making rubbings using black wax crayons, which were converted to line drawings, colour slide and monochrome photography, copious notes and map locations. Moreover, Stan had a strong commitment to making his recordings and knowledge widely available, which was unsurprising given that he was a trained teacher with a strong dedication to public education. He authored many publications including 17 books and booklets on rock art, all of which were underpinned by his desire to make information accessible to the public.
The archive was previously made accessible in the form of a database driven website hosted by Newcastle University. It was eventually taken down in 2015 due to a combination of security concerns and a lack of available funding to upgrade the database and secure ongoing maintenance. Beckensall’s records were also hosted by the English Heritage funded England’s Rock Art (ERA) website, which was the primary output of the Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Project (NADRAP), but the website was subject to the same fate a few years later in 2021. From this point the archive was only available in an extremely limited form online using internet archive retrieval programmes