How to build a stone circle

 

The 1975 / 1976 Gorsedd Circle at Netpool, Cardigan

The Gorsedd Circle dating from 1975 for the proclamation of the 1976 Eisteddfod,  now installed at Netpool, Cardigan.  The tall stone nearest to the camera is the only one that stands over 2m.  All the stones are dolerites.

I rather like this Gorsedd Circle, erected first of all at Brondesbury Park in 1975 for the proclamation of the 1976 Cardigan National Eisteddfod, and then moved in 1995 to its present site at Netpool -- a stone's throw from the River Teifi.  It's set in a verdany public park, with adjacent parking, very close to the town's largest cemetery.

There are 11 stones and one inlier, set around a central group of large recumbent stones at the "node".  Thbiggest slab is called the Maen Llog or Logan Stone.  The inlier stone is due east of the circle centre, creating an approximate alignment with the rising sun at the midsummer solstice.  This is all part of the formula invented by Iolo Morgannwg many moons ago.

The Maen Llog at the centre of the circle, used for ceremonials involving the Gorsedd bards and the druids.

As for the stones themselves, they are all igneous, and all appear to be dolerites.  One or two are spotted, but the majority are not.  We have to assume that they originated on Preseli, but I have not been able to access infon as to the actual location.  I imagine that they will not have been taken from the common, but from land belonging to a friendly farmer -- most likely on the north flank of the upland.

The circle is made from a weird and wacky assortment of stones, all except one under 2m tall.  It's rather appealing because of its sheer eccentricity!  the shapes are irregulat blocks rather than tall pillars or slabs.  I am sutrre they have just been picked up from recumbent positions either in hedge banks or in stony ground.  Most surfaces are heavily weathered and most edges are heavily abraded, so this speaks of some glacial transport and long exposure to the elements.  There are some surfaces which are very fresh -- caused by breakage during collection and transport. On some stones you can see changes in the surface patina that must have coincided with ground level where stones were partly buried or embedded in till or surface soil.  There are abundant deep gouges and chain marks on nearly all the stones -- the result iof rough treatment by mechanical diggers and otherc machines employed during stone collection.

Serious damage was done to this stone during collection.  Note the machinery scars on the left face: these are notv very fresh, suggesting damage many years ago when the stone may have been dragged from an inconvenient poosition and set into a hedge.  Note that on the same face we can see the old ground level.

The most colourful stone in the circle.

On this stone, two faces with differing degrees of weathering.  There is comprehensive machinery damage; some of the grooves and scars are old, and some are new, suggesting at least two phases of stone movement.

Another stone which is heavily abraded, probably by ice action. Again there is heavy surface damage from machinery.  The lower part of the stone has previously been embedded in the ground somewhat more deeply.

It's somewhat ironiv that Iolo Morgannwg, in laying out the rules for Gorsedd Circles, specified that the stones used should be "unhewn" -- so as to remain uncontaminated through contact with iron.   But all of these stones have been seriously bashed about by heavy machinery........  that's progress for you.

====================

The definitive guide to the modern Gorsedd Circles of Wales:

https://sublimewales.wordpress.com/attractions/18th-and-19th-century-stone-circles/gorsedd-circles/

Michael Freeman has done great work on this, and his beautifully illustrated blog is well worth a visit.

Seec also:

https://sublimewales.wordpress.com/attractions/18th-and-19th-century-stone-circles/gorsedd-circles/list-of-gorsedd-circles/

The preposterous pretence of precision provenancing

The Brimham Grit formation crops out across an estimated 150 sq km of countryside, covered in part by glacial deposits.  Then we have the Lower Coal Measures................  

 I am more and more intrigued by the apparent obsession -- on the part of assorted geologists and archaeologists -- with taking a lump of stone from an archaeological context and claiming to have found the exact location, to within a few square metres, of the spot from which it was taken   I choose my words carefully -- because there is an underlying assumption that said lump of stone must have been selected and fetched by human beings at its place of origin and then carried across land or sea to its final resting place.  Underpinning this assumption is the belief that naturally transported stones (such as glacial erratics) were somehow deemed inadequate, and that the fetching of the stone from a faraway location was a superior activity within the Neolithic belief system.  All very weird when we consider that in glaciated parts of Northern Europe burial chambers and stone settings generally were always made of glacial erratics if they were available and from broken bedrock slabs and pillars if they were close at hand -- as at Callanish.   But nobody carried stones across country for great distances, as pointed out many years ago by Geoffrey Kellaway, Stephen Briggs, Olwen Williams-Thorpe and others.  There is no sign at all that glacial erratics were considered inferior for megalithic building projects. Indeed, we can make a case that they were more highly valued than "quarried" stones:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-special-status-of-unhewn-rocks-and.html

And yet Parker Pearson, Ixer, Bevins, Clarke and many others persist with their illogical conviction that monoliths needed to be FETCHED in order to be deemed useful.

All this comes sharply into focus because of the latest offering from Clarke et al on the origins of the Devils Arrows stones.  I was forcefully reminded of how easy it is to sell an idea through the careful choice of the method you choose for the portrayal of your data.  As I have mentioned in another post, their basic problem is a lack of data.  That may sound strange, given that the article looks hugely impressive, packed with technical complexities, tables and graphic representations.  But in attempting to assign an origin to the megaliths in question, they have only ONE serious "candidate" sampling point -- Brimham Rocks.  On that basis alone, the article should be laughed out of court.  But let's look at their Figure 6, which is a "multidimensional scaling plot" based on 60 comparative data sets.

Deliberate prehistoric sourcing of the Devil's Arrows, Britain's tallest stone row Open Access
Anthony Clarke, Jim Leary, Chris Kirkland, Proc. R. Soc. A (2026) 482 (2345): 20260504 .
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2026.0504

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspa/article/482/2345/20260504/483254/Deliberate-prehistoric-sourcing-of-the-Devil-s

The Devils Arrows "field" or blob on the map  is an artifice -- it appears to be an aggregate obtained by amalgamating the sample results from the 4 monoliths.  So it is a phantom.  It does not represent any of the real world monoliths.   This is completely unacceptable in an article that purports to have discovered that monoliths A, B, C and D have all come from point source E.  Statistical manipulation gone mad.

The authors of this paper have not demonstrated that the 4 sampled monoliths that constitute the Devil's Arrows have actually come from the same place.  Three of the sampled monoliths are incorporated into Fig 3A, but there is no trace of sample 4. It might be wildly different from samples 1, 2 and 3, or it might look rather similar.  But it is incorporated into an amalgamated sample anyway.  That is completely unacceptable.  The number of grains analysed (total 146) is also unacceptably low for a study of this type. 

Another fundamental flaw in this study relates to sampling methods.  The samples for the 4 monoliths were taken with sticky tape, which introduces a massive bias that should have been spelt out.  At best each sample should be spelt out as being "partially representative" of the real world situation.  This might have been acceptable if the Brimham Crags sample had been taken in the same way.  But we learn that the the sample from this potential source area was taken from a whole rock sample knocked off a bedrock outcrop (no actual location provided) and weighing c 1 kg.  So you are not comparing like with like. No matter what statistical wizardry you employ in your defence, this invalidates the whole study.  On this basis alone, the study should have been rejected outright by the publishers.

Figure 3A looks very impressive, but we have no idea how similar, or how different, the 3 chosen samples look when seen alongside samples taken in the same way from comparative or control sites. To make matters worse, later in the paper, these sticky tape sample results are compared with multiple samples analysed by Andrew Morton and others from across the Millstone Grit and Coal Measures outcrops which were NOT sticky tape samples.  Again, unacceptable.

In Figure 4C the authors claim that "Zircon concordia ages older than 510Ma showing shared peaks between these datasets and divergence from Plumpton Rocks, supporting a Brimham Rocks source." The visual match is not very close at all -- you do not need a computer to tell you that.  And because there is a poor match with a "straw man" sample (Plumpton Rocks), that does nothing whatsoever to strengthen the claim of a Brimham Rocks source.  That's a bizarre and utterly biased interpretation of what the diagram shows.

Back to Figure 6.  The extra data sets portrayed on the diagram were of course carefully chosen from the literature. The scale of the graphic representation is very small, with the samples for Brimham Rocks and the Devils Arrows shown close together in the middle. The closest match to the Devils Arrows is not Brimham Rocks but a sample from the Pennine Basin Lower Coal Measures, in an article by Morton et al, 2024. (This is a Langsettian sandstone  from the Pennine Basin Lower Coal Measures at Binchester Crags, approximately 70 km to the north.)  But there is no proper discussion of this as a possible source for the Devils Arrows, apart from a cursory dismissal on the grounds that the Late Devensian or LGM ice flow directions were not deemed suitable for ice transport.  Again this is completely unacceptable, since as the authors acknowledge, erratic monoliths might have been moved multiple times during a number of glacial episodes. 

Thorpe RS, Williams-Thorpe O.1991  The myth of long-distance megalith transport.  Antiquity 65, pp 64–73.   (doi:10.1017/S0003598X00079308)

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/myth-of-longdistance-megalith-transport/F16F6E44F8B8E1040E705748E4DCF9D0

 

If we eliminate all the "noise" from this graphic representation, and use a large scale instead of a small one, we see that Brimham Rocks is NOT a perfect match, and on this basis alone the authors should have undertaken much more comprehensive sampling across outcrops of both the lower Coal Measures and the Kinderscoutian Brimham Grit  to the north and west.

It's all too easy to forget, in this obsessive hunt for precise provenances, that in nature we have continuums and gradations and not neatly packaged boxes of rocks that can be given different labels.  Obviously, in our search for order and in the quest for knowledge, we do use labels (sandstone, limestone, dolerite, rhyolite etc) but the parameters that we use are man-made artifices, including all the units of measurement, and there are endless gradations between one rock type and another.  Hence the debate between me and Ixer and Bevins about the number of rock types represented in the Stonehenge erratic assemblage.

One of the big lessons I took away from my doctorate research in West Wales in 1962-65 (on the Quaternary sediments and glacial chronology of North Pembrokeshire)  is that it is easy to create labels -- Irish Sea till, Lower Head, Upper Head, Raised Beach, Blown Sand etc -- but remarkably difficult in the field to identify these strata because the gradations are so subtle.  I spent hundreds of hours in the lab weighing, drying, sampling, sieving, and identifying stone shapes and sizes so that I could convince others that I knew what I was talking about, but I knew that the methods I chose for the representation of my results were those that best suited my purpose.  But I had to be prepared to face the challenges of others, not least in a long face-to-face scrutiny session with my examiners.

One of my triangular plots from 1965, showing particle size distributions for key sediment types in the Quaternary succession in North Pembrokeshire.  The labels are of course subjective and arbitrary, and there are overlaps and gradations everywhere........ 

One of my triangular plots from 1965, showing the particle size distributions. No statistical manipulation.   Useful, but what the plots show is that nature is very messy......

Map of glacial and related deposits around Rhos-y-Clegyrn.  A lot of fieldwork went into this, but the boundaries are invisible in the real world, and are at best educated guesses.  You cannot sample every square meter of territory, or improve reliability by statistical manipulation.

When I was trying to demonstrate the particle size distributions of samples from different stratigraphic units I used triangular diagrams, and indeed they did show considerable lithologiocal differences between Irish Sea Till,  fluvioglacial and other deposits......... But while nature is very organized and obeys the laws of physics, to us it often appears disorganized;  and within the Irish Sea till group of exposures there were some samples with an unusually high content of gravels, and within the fluvioglacial group there were some samples with a high clay content.  The same variability is found within solid rock formations, and it is thus very frustrating when Clarke et al claim to have represented the Brimham Grit after collecting just one sample.  That sample might just be wildly unrepresentative, and a much better match might be found elsewhere.

If somebody was to present me with a 2 kg bag of Irish Sea Till and ask me to tell them where it comes from, my response would be "Man, you must be joking...."

We do not know everything about everywhere.  The claims by Ixer and Bevins to have found the precise source for the Stonehenge spotted dolerites at Carn Goedog and and for certain Stonehenge foliated rhyolite fragments at Craig Rhosyfelin are simply absurd, since they have no idea where the same rock types may exist in the unsampled landscape. Besides, they have never produced any perfect matches.

Precision provenancing is a fantasy, sold to the media and a gullible public by academics who should know better.

===============

PS.  Of course, the fatal flaw in the MPP narrative and the Ixer / Bevins provenancing work is that it is all based on a single premise -- namely that the glacial transport of the bluestones is unsupported by any field evidence, and that it therefore could not and did not happen.  The premise is false.  Glacial transport was perfectly possible and indeed probable, given the wide range of supporting evidence presented in the literature.

The Archdruid of UCL

The Archdruid of UCL: Mike Parker Pearson and the Neolithic Gorsedd of Bards


For over half a century, the mainstream archaeological establishment has treated the ghost of 18th-century antiquarianism with steadfast derision. Generations of university students have been taught to laugh at William Stukeley and John Aubrey for looking at Stonehenge and for inventing a romantic "Druidic Temple." We have been told, with immense scientific gravity, that the Iron Age Druids lived thousands of years after the stones were erected, and that any talk of a secretive, white-robed, elite intellectual class possessing "sacred knowledge" of the stones is nothing but a modern, fabricated delusion.

Fast forward to four years ago, when Parker Pearson initiated and drove a multi-disciplinary paleoenvironmental investigation in the Preseli Hills, fully expecting the pollen cores to rubber-stamp his grand "Exodus Theory”. He needed the pollen analysis and other data to show that West Wales was “emptied” around 3000 BC, proving that the local population had packed up their stone circles and marched off to Wiltshire with them. Instead, objective science did what it should do: it refused to print the script. The pollen analyses came back showing unbroken agricultural and pastoral continuity [Spencer et al., 2025]. The people didn't leave. They stayed put, farming their fields, grazing their livestock and putting up assorted megalithic structures such as burial chambers, straight through the 3000 BC horizon. Further, the environmental data proved that the lowland valleys were choked with a dense primary deciduous swamp-forest that would instantly defeat any overland stone-transporting convoy.

This story of stability and slow evolution is essentially what we already know from the work of Darvill and Wainwright and from the painstaking record keeping with regard to West Wales archaeological sites by Dyfed Archaeology.

The language used in the article by Spencer et al is extraordinary, desperately incorporating multiple gratuitous references to Stonehenge, stone quarries and stone transport and throwing in so many unfounded assumptions and speculations that the integrity of the study is seriously compromised. That’s a pity, since the basic science seems quite sound and even important.

What we now see is that Professor MPP,  in a series of increasingly bizarre sociological pivots, has inadvertently resurrected the spirit of Iolo Morganwg. To save his human-transport dogma from the unyielding realities of Quaternary geomorphology and palynology, he has been forced to invent an invisible, multi-regional, prehistoric elite secret society.

So, faithful blog followers, welcome to the Neolithic Gorsedd of Bards.

Because he cannot abandon the human-transport narrative without discrediting a vast output of academic publications, MPP has had to  rewrite the social structure of the Neolithic. Moving the stones is no longer a broad, communal, societal migration involving a whole tribal society. Instead, it has been re-interpreted as an exclusive, top-down corporate enterprise involving a select few, driven by powerful leaders who used public symbols to impress and manipulate the masses. We are not talking about tribal chieftains and the ruling class; we are talking about something much more subtle involving belief, not strength or power.

According to this new narrative, this highly specialized, elite lineage of prehistoric project managers and logistics experts—also possessing some esoteric knowledge of ancestral connections—somehow held the absolute political and spiritual authority to command delegations of workers to commute across Britain to build Stonehenge, leaving the regular peasantry back in Wales to tend the cattle.

It’s more complex than that, since MPP now seems to be suggesting that 80 bluestones were passed from one community to another in a sort of megelithic relay (like the one that carries the Olympic flame) through dozens of different tribal territories over many generations. If true, this must have required an immense bureaucratic machine, with a high level of managed infrastructure, enforcement, and policing. There would have been permanent or seasonal base camps along the route to house, feed, and manage thousands of labourers. But MPP faces a problem. There is absolutely no trace of any such infrastructure along the proposed coastal or overland routes between Pembrokeshire and Wiltshire. The archaeological record shows nothing but scattered, normal domestic debris from local farming and hunting as people went about their humdrum daily lives.

The MPP hypothesis depends on a "pan-British alliance" where different communities willingly cooperated or were forced by this mysterious "elite" to haul heavy stones for a distant monument they would likely never see. But tribal societies are notoriously territorial and protective of their resources. To suggest that dozens of decentralized, independent communities along the Bristol Channel or Welsh borders blindly submitted to some outside elite who wanted them to act as a transport service defies everything we know about tribalism and human behaviour. There is no evidence of any Neolithic organization capable of enforcing such back-breaking labor across tribal lines.

It is one thing to imagine a single tribal community bringing a "prestige stone" as a one-off diplomatic gift. It is a completely different story to coordinate the movement of 80 bluestone boulders of assorted shapes and sizes. The logistical nightmare of scheduling, labor rotation, food supply, and boat/sledge maintenance for a continuous multi-stone conveyor belt would rival the logistics of the Roman Empire. Yet, we are asked to believe this was orchestrated by a ghost elite who left behind nothing but modest traces of their habitations, assorted small stone settings on burial sites, and simple pottery in West Wales.

By framing this gigantic enterprise as a "unification project", the narrative uses comforting, modern metaphors to mask a total vacuum of physical evidence. When you strip away the storytelling, the sheer lack of administrative and material traces proves that the "grand relay" is a logistical fantasy simply and rather blatantly designed to keep the human-transport theory alive.

If this sounds familiar, it should. It is the blueprint of the Gorsedd of Bards, dreamt up out of thin air in 1792 by Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams). Iolo, a brilliant stonemason and romantic myth-maker, forged "ancient Druidic triads" and constructed an imaginary, elite intellectual class who held sacred control over the landscape's stones and who kept alive their language and cultural traditions. Similarly, the British Druid Order and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (1964) are neo-druidic groups whose origins go back no further than the early 20th Century. The Ancient Order of Druids was established in 1781. See Cusack 2012 for a fascinating history of the relationship between Druidism and Stonehenge……..

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259926084_Charmed_Circle_Stonehenge_Contemporary_Paganism_and_Alternative_Archaeology

In modern Druidism, the Ovates are responsible for "calling the Ancestors" -- and MPP seems to be assuming this function on the part of his stone-moving Neolithic elite.  They are the "walkers between worlds," delivering prayers or invocations to the spirits of the land and the ancestors who walked it before.   In the good old days they would of course have known about the spirits of the ancestors embodied or buried within certain sacred stones...........

Back to the stones. The comedy turns to farce when MPP attempts to explain how this Neolithic Gorsedd actually moved the bluestones through a dense, primeval forest without leaving a single sledge track, broken or abandoned stone, or cleared route through the forest. His current working hypothesis is that the stones were lifted onto simple wooden lattices and physically carried on the shoulders of scores of men.

Let’s apply a basic, common-sense cost-benefit analysis to this engineering proposition. Let’s say that a standard bluestone weighs around 3 tonnes. To build a timber grid or "stretcher" rigid enough to bear a concentrated load of this size without instantly snapping across the middle, you cannot use light saplings. You need thick, seasoned oak trunks configured into a structural, cross-braced frame.

By the time you build a timber apparatus large enough to distribute that weight across 80 or 100 carrying positions, the wooden lattice itself would weigh up to 2 or 3 tons. it is no longer simple, but highly complex. The elite Druidic commuters (or their slaves or faithful followers) wouldn’t just be carrying the stone; they would be carrying an additional dead-weight of timber that effectively doubled the load. Combine that with the ergonomic nightmare of packing dozens of men shoulder-to-shoulder on rough, hummocky and boggy terrain, where a single trip or misstep by one carrier triggers a catastrophic domino effect, and the "carrying lattice" exposes itself as a structural absurdity.

When antiquarians and modern Druidic groups erect man-made replica stone circles for the National Eisteddfod, they are practicing a recognized, modern, romantic tradition. We can call it the ultimate form of institutional pageantry. All perfectly harmless……

The MPP research team has boxed itself into a corner. Those involved are willing to violate the fundamental laws of engineering, human biomechanics, and their own funded environmental data rather than admit a simple geological truth: Neolithic builders were essentially pragmatists and opportunists. They didn't need a secret society to conquer Wales or Scotland or to unify a vast array of different tribal groups with their own cultural traditions and preferences. In the real world they simply gathered a mixed, heterogeneous assortment of stones that an ancient glacier had already dropped either on the undulating chalk terrain of Salisbury Plain or very close to it.

Occam’s Razor rules. As Hitchens and Sagan have said with reference to all scientific work, if you want to propose extraordinary and eccentric events or intentions, you must at the same time present incredibly powerful and incontrovertible supporting evidence. This applies to hypotheses relating to Neolithic culture, just as it applies to everything else. Such evidence is entirely missing, and the narrative can therefore be dismissed out of hand.

So where does the Archdruid of UCL go next in his campaign to invent yet more bizarre Neolithic behaviour and to disempower the earth sciences? A Neolithic Eisteddfod with the Preseli Male Voice Choir winning a famous choral competition, cheered on by family and friends? The re-establishment of the REALLY ANCIENT Order of British Druids? A nice little cult, with the Archdruid at its centre? But don’t we have that already, in all but name?

NOTE

“The vast literature on Stonehenge offers the widest conceivable range of answers, or guesses. Various authors have attributed it to the Phoenicians, Romans, Danes, Saxons, Celtic Druids, British aborigines, Brahmins, Egyptians, Chaldeans, and even . . . the Red Indians, Giants, dwarves and supernatural forces, Atlanteans and extra-terrestrials. It has been called a temple, an observatory, a memorial, a parliament, a necropolis, an orrery, a stone-age computer, and much besides. One might almost suppose that it was specifically designed to accommodate every notion that could possible be projected onto it. For at Stonehenge no antiquarian cause is ever finally lost.” John Michell

REFERENCE

Carole Cusack . 2012. Charmed Circle: Stonehenge, Contemporary Paganism, and Alternative ArchaeologyJanuary 2012 Numen 59(2-3):138-155

DOI: 10.2307/23244956

===============

 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259926084_Charmed_Circle_Stonehenge_Contemporary_Paganism_and_Alternative_Archaeology

The Devil's Arrows: more smoke and mirrors from Clarke and Co

Natural rectangular gritstone blocks in the woods at Brimham Rocks

I may not be a technical wizard, but after many years of scrutinizing papers in many different fields I know when I am confronted by pseudo-science, and I know how to ask the fundamental question: Are the conclusions reached in the paper on the desk (or on the screen) justified by the evidence presented?

Well, I have been taking a quick look at this new article, just published with a good deal of marketing hype and gullible media coverage:

Deliberate prehistoric sourcing of the Devil's Arrows, Britain's tallest stone row Open Access
Anthony Clarke,  Jim Leary,  Chris Kirkland,  Proc. R. Soc. A (2026) 482 (2345): 20260504 .
https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2026.0504

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspa/article/482/2345/20260504/483254/Deliberate-prehistoric-sourcing-of-the-Devil-s

I will come back to it with a more detailed discussion, but these are my initial thoughts.

1. Stratigraphic Continuity & Sampling Overreach

The paper conflates an extensive sedimentary feature—the Kinderscoutian Brimham Grit—with a prominent modern landmark (Brimham Rocks) .

The authors have failed to run control samples across the full lateral extent of the formation, meaning that they cannot mathematically distinguish the famous crag from either prominent or unspectacular outcrops or  strata many miles away which are now buried beneath glacial deposits.

Sampling of the Brimham Grit was restricted to a single location -- a prominent, easily accessible tourist viewpoint, substituting modern human landscape perceptions and preferences for a rigorous sampling programme.

2. Glacial Dynamics Blind Spot.     

The authors appear to be completely naive about the processes of glacial entrainment.  Their simplistic ice-flow objections assume glaciers must have plucked stones from the modern topographic 

high points such as Brimham Rocks.

The Brimham Grit is mapped by BGS across an extensive area  to the west and northwest of Boroughbridge, sitting directly in the path of Devensian ice flowing south and east through the Dales margins. Ice flow during earlier glaciations will not have been significantly different.

The Vale of York is a thoroughly documented glacial depositional zone; the paper fails to demonstrate that streaming ice cannot have entrained the Devil's Arrows and other prominen gritstone blocks and dropped them nearby as convenient erratics.

3. Visual and Statistical Disconnect Histogram Mismatch: 

In spite of the claims in the paper, the raw, unmanipulated zircon age histograms presented look visibly distinct to the naked eye, indicating different physical proportions of mineral grains.

Further, there is statistical masking; the multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) models are highly susceptible to being flooded with irrelevant regional "noise" data (e.g., distant Scottish or Southern English formations), which artificially dilutes local variance to force a tight, artificial cluster match.

Finally, the paper relies on the technique of "telling rather than showing," claiming there are no better matches in the region without actually showing us the evidence accumulated over the years by Andrew Morton and other heavy mineral specialists.

I don't know the field, but it seems to me that the papers by Andrew Morton and his co-authors (in classic papers mapping the heterogeneous sediment routing of the Pennine Basin) are strictly used as "decorative authority".   Clarke and his colleagues are saying "We know the literature.  Trust us....."  Other authorities are cited generically in the introduction to establish that "the detrital zircon spectra of siliciclastic rocks across the Pennine Basin are highly heterogeneous", giving this paper a veneer of geological respectability.  However, when it comes to the actual analysis, Clarke et al completely sidestep the profound implications of previous research. Instead of meaningfully confronting it, they treat it with disdain.

All in all, this is extremely poor science from a team which is getting an unfortunate reputation for making spectacular claims on the basis of very limited fieldwork and totally inadequate sampling protocols. This is the third highly controversial paper from  the Australian "Curtin University school" of geo-archaeology—led by Dr Anthony Clarke and Professor Chris Kirkland.  Their high-profile papers, including the Stonehenge Altar Stone Scottish origin study (Nature, 2024), the Salisbury Plain stream sediment study (Communications Earth & Environment, 2026), and now the Devil's Arrows paper (Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2026), tend to dazzle the media, and parts of the academic community, because of their high-tech nature.  

Clarke and Kirkland have access to some of the world's most advanced LA-ICP-MS (Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry) equipment at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. When a paper is packed with complex U-Pb isotopic data, core geochemistry, and mineral-scale physics, it creates an intimidating "black box." Archaeology peer-reviewers often lack the highly specialized geochronological background to dispute the numbers, assuming that spectacular machine precision equals geological accuracy.  Instead of publishing in strict, traditional field-geology journals (where regional specialists would immediately question stratigraphic continuity or lateral lithological variations), they target high-impact, multi-disciplinary, or rapid-communication journals (such as Nature, and Royal Society Proceedings). These platforms prioritize groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting narratives and spectacular "discoveries"over cautious, regional field mapping.  And they don't come cheap............

So, to conclude:

Clarke et al have shown quite effectively that the stones referred to as a group called the Devil's Arrows have probably come from the Kinderscoutian gritstone in the Millstone Grit group.  They have NOT shown that the tall standing stones came from the same precise location -- namely Brimham Rocks.

They have NOT shown that the standing stones were transported by human beings.

They have NOT shown that glacial transport was impossible.

They have NOT ruled out multiple other locations to the west and north-west of Boroughbridge from which the stones might originally have been transported by ice.

Those trench and borehole records for Stonehenge Bottom etc

Stonehenge Bottom and Stonehenge -- from Evironment Agency and 

EH imagery, with thanks

Thanks to Steve for highlighting these rather obscure records of "glacial" features and deposits turned up during the long research programme related to the A303 road and tunnel proposals.  The word "glacial" pops up a few times, but we don't know whether it was used after due consideration by a glacial geomorphologist (in which case we need to take it all rather seriously) or whether there was just a slapdash use of terminolgy.  "Glacial" might have been used accidentally instead of the word "periglacial" just as the term "Ice Age" might have been used just to signify great age.  We shall see.

But the reference to "glacial till" seems to be more considered.........

Check out this very interesting post: 

https://www.buystonehenge.com/the-glacial-a303/

From Steve Hooker's blog site: 

Sample 51138, forty litres of the Trench 511 sequence, sits in the Wessex Archaeology archive. Nobody has examined it with the drift question in mind. Clast lithology, fabric, micromorphology and mineral provenance could tell till from solifluction from riverwash. Dating it is a separate fight.

The four Phase 7B OSL cores: where are the results? If ages exist, publish them. If the cores were never run, they may yet be datable. An age alone would not identify a till, but a Middle Pleistocene number under that coombe would change the conversation.

The hummocky belt at Stonehenge Bottom has never been archaeologically sectioned. One trench through the toe would separate phosphate diggings from solifluction from anything older. I’ll guess permission from English Heritage is a hard ask.

Nobody has clast-counted the coombe and colluvial deposits for exotics. The quartzite at STP72602 says the method can detect them.

Are you the hero?

Anyone could do most of this: no research council, no grant. An afternoon in an archive. A phone call to Wessex Archaeology asking after sample 51138. An email to the Gloucestershire lab asking where four sealed cores went. The trench is the exception. That needs consents stacked three deep, this being the middle of a World Heritage Site, so bring patience and a professional dig team. The documents have been public for years, the samples are on shelves, and the question has never been asked of the material that could answer it. So I hope some fascinated party asks. Maybe that is you, dear interested reader, who made it this far.

The Wessex Archaeology sample 51138 clearly needs to be looked at by somebody who knows what a till looks like when fresh, and what it might look like when thoroughly degraded.

How the Stonehenge obsession destroys sound science

Open moorland up on the mountain -- at Bedd yr Afanc

I have been having another read of the article Dr Daisy Spencer and others on palynology and environmental change in Holocene Preseli, and am saddened by the manner in which an otherwise sound and quite important piece of work by competent scientists has been destroyed by its obsessive and quite irrational obsession with Stonehenge and the bluestones.........

Daisy Eleanor Spencer, Karen Molloy, Mike Parker Pearson, Ralph Fyfe & Aaron Potito (19 Oct 2025): Prehistoric Landscape Change Around the Sources of Stonehenge’s Bluestones in Preseli, Wales, Environmental Archaeology, DOI:10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741
https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741

Dr Daisy Spencer’s 2-year post-doctoral research Fellowship at the University of Galway was probably funded to the tune of at least 90,000 Euros.  It had the title: ’Palynology and land use in Preseli: Investigating the origin of the Stonehenge bluestones and population migration’.   So right from the start the research was framed as a part of MPP's grand project and Preseli was framed as a sort of annexe of Stonehenge.  Timeline — project announcement August 2022. Completion August 2024. Publication 2025 by a group including MPP.

According to the info on the University of Galway web site, pollen work was to be undertaken by Daisy and her co-workers "close to the important Neolithic bluestone site of Waun Mawn stone circle and the quarries at Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin".  When I read that I had that familiar sinking feeling....... here comes the familiar ruling hypothesis........

Three sites where hot disputes are blissfully ignored by the authors of this article

"It was hoped", said the blurb,  "that results would help to shed light as to whether there was a decline in population around 3000 BC in this area, resulting from a migration out of west Wales, with people travelling with the Bluestones to form the first stage of Stonehenge."   So there was a clear objective, dictated by MPP -- which was I suppose inevitable given that he must have been involved in the grant funding application for the fellowship and the lab and research costs that are considerable with palynological studies and radiocarbon dating.

As I read through the text, I found myself swinging from one extreme to the other.  One minute, admiration for the professional expertise of the researchers, and then frustration at yet another gratuitous mention of bluestones, Stonehenge, lost circles and quarries in places where clean and straightforward science was all that was needed.  I don't recall a single instance where the authors referred to "suggested", "proposed" or "postulated" features; the pretence was maintained throughout that these features are definitively proved to have existed.  The authors were -- or so they pretend --  completely oblivious to the fact that there are serious and fundamental disputes in the literature. Needless to say, there are no citations of "inconvenient" articles in the peer-reviewed literature.  Naivety?  Arrogance? Complacency? How did the journal's peer review process fail to pick up on this?

I gave up on counting these strange and quite unnecessary mentions (and their associated citations)  in the end, and decided that if the researchers did not have the strength of character to resist the abundant textual insertions by a certain well known professor, there was no great point in taking their work seriously.  Such a pity.

OK -- they disproved the hypothesis, but they could, and should, have challenged the very foundations of that absurdly fragile edifice.