I recently heard the sad news that Mr. Stuart Feather died in August 2002.
Stuart Feather’s name will be familiar to anyone who has an interest in the Cup and Ring rock art in our region. From the early 1960s he did a prodigious amount of pioneering fieldwork, discovering significant new sites and  reporting details from many more North and West Yorkshire rock art sites. The results of his work were mainly noted in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal and the Bradford and Cartwright Hall archaeological group Bulletins, where the detailed pencil drawings of the Ilkley moor carvings in their moorland settings are particularly memorable.  

During this time Mr. Feather worked for the Bradford museum services and took charge of a project to create a museum of Industrial Heritage for the area. This mammoth task required his full attention and commitment to the industrial archaeology and as a consequence left less time for his rock art interests, although occasional reports still appeared in a number of journals. 

In recent years I contacted Mr. Feather on several occasions regarding the rock art on the North York Moors, and received his encouragement to follow up his earlier work with more detailed recording. This work is still ongoing and it is a shame he did not live to see the full results.
In 2002 the Ilkley Archaeological Group were in the final stages of preparing a publication "The Cup and Ring Marked rocks of the Valleys Aire, Wharfe, Wasburn and Nidd" and proposed to dedicate this book to earlier researchers in the field, including Mr. Feather. When later that year Mr. Feather was taken ill, he was able to see the proofs from sections of the publication relating to his work and was apparently pleased by the results. This book dedication is in some measure an acknowledgement of his contribution to rock art research in Britain.