RAM June 5th 2011

Hi Folks,

I would like thank everyone who made it to the RAM this year at Lordenshaws. It was good to meet up with some old friends, spending the time looking at some of the panels and having a good natter. This year was a different type of meeting, with the loss of our good friend Jan, it felt good for everyone to get together and discuss how we go in the future. We have plans for another meeting in Northumberland in September when hopefully the weather is better. Plans for next years main RAM in Kilmartin are also underway.
I hope we can use this blog as a central point for our future plans for rock art in the uk, until we can find out if the BRAC site can be brought back.

BRAC on Flickr

This is a group i started on flickr about a year or so ago, so if anyone wants to post here please feel free to.

Thanks again to all our rock art friends.

With the weather being so bad, i am not sure if people could imagine what was there. This is a shot i took a couple of years ago of the horseshoe carving.

Brian

The “British Rock Art Collection” has vanished!

Hi Folks,

It is hard to believe that amidst natural catastrophes and political turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East, another relatively small disaster took place. On the early morning of the 8th of March, apparently someone in Wakefield pulled the plug (and trigger!) of the Fotopic server, cashed the bank accounts and is now probably ordering a cool drink on some South American beach. Fotopic hosted not only the “British Rock Art Collection  (BRAC)” and the “Worldwide Rock Art Selection (WRAS)” for about six years but thousands of other websites with over 27 million photos on-line. With over 18.000 rock art photos on-line and over half a million photo hits so far, the site was used by many rock art enthusiasts from around the world. But is was not only the photos -hundreds of them contributed by our good rock art friends- that are no longer enjoyable on the web. Stories and literary thousands of links to relevant information are gone as well. Thousands of clients trusted the company and lost all their photos what makes it double sad. The chance of a re-appearance of the site gets slimmer by the day and we foresee that we will never get a glimpse of its content again. And no one saw this coming; no warning in advance…… e-mail bounced back, telephone lines dead….. over & out!

So that was that! And although we still have our family, friends, homes, database, photos (yeah…double backed up!) and good spirit, just a bit of self-pity seems to be justified! But not for long; out-living your websites is a weird experience. We will use the time to come to see how we proceed from here. It is obvious that this Blog will get a more prominent role. There are already some reactions on Facebook. Bear with us folks!

From Gus and me all the best and keep on rocking.

Jan