Britain's Secret Prehistoric Masterpiece

This is Faithfly, a typical estate in Clydebank, Scotland. It has your typical houses, typical chippy, typical footy pitch. But it has one thing that's not typical at all. One of the largest [music] carved panels of rock art in Britain.

So the surface of the rock is something like 100 square meters and it's covered in over 100 [music] prehistoric carved symbols. It's called the Cockna stone. I'd recommend you visit. However, it's buried.

It's actually been deliberately buried. It was only uncovered briefly in 2016 by Dr. Kenny Brophy and his team from Glasgow University. >> It was really special.

I mean, I haven't had many days in my career where I've been emotional. [music] Kenny probably knows more about this stone than anyone alive today. But what is this prehistoric masterpiece? Why was it buried?

What are the markings on it which connected to prehistoric sites across Europe? Some say this is a portal to another dimension. I'm certainly skeptical of that to say the least. But honestly, how did people in prehistory view these things?

Did they kind of view them as doors to another world? Yeah, it's an incredible piece of archaeology. Let's get into it. [music] The cocknos stone was first discovered by shepherds in the mid 1880s who reported it to a Reverend Harvey.

Then he reported that in the media, so I think it ended up being mentioned in the London Illustrated News or something like that, weirdly. And also in some of the local media and press and he wrote an article about it. And then in the 1890s, John Bruce went with William Donnelly to do a more formal scientific recorded drawing of the site. So they uncovered all of the panel rather than the small part that Harvey had found.

and he did a very detailed drawing of the whole of the site, which in fact is really the basis for almost every drawing that's been done of the site up until we uncovered it again recently. You can see the original drawing here in this old paper. [music] I absolutely love it. I There's something I really love about old scientific illustrations.

There's just a texture to them that I I just love with the old typewriter font as well. Makes me really feel like I'm discovering a secret. Actually, incredible detail on the stone. The stone really ...