Another edifice built on the sinking sands

Summer solstice madness........

Today the media are carrying the latest fantastical story about the "Stonehenge prototype" found near Bulford.  The narrative is accompanied by much praise for the latest persistent and heroic archaeologist who features in video interviews -- this time not Indiana Jones or MPP, but Phil Harding

It has all been carefully planned by Wessex Archaeology, BBC and Channel 4,  Time Team and English Heritage.  There are excited reports all over the place, in social media and in the news outlets, about a newly discovered "structure" which showed that the locals were all very scientific and religious 500 years before the Stonehenge stone monument was thought of.  Apparently a new (old) circle has been discovered, including two prominent post holes that once held huge vertical wooden posts, and lots of other holes associated with assorted finds that demonstrate the presence of an organized and busy society.    In fairness to Phil Harding and the other archaeologists involved in the Bulford dig, they have not claimed that themselves, but have pointed out that the other pit traces are not on the circumference of a circle but are dotted around in several smallish groups.  The artifacts discovered are not that spectacular either, if truth be told.....

But the two wooden posts deemed to have been prominent features in the landscape are apparently aligned with the midsummer solstice sunrise and the midwinter solstice sunset.  So we are told by  Wessex Archaeology in their press release.  Apparently skyscape archaeologist Dr Fabio Silva has done the sums,  and the coordinates for the 2,950 BC horizon come out exactly right.  Well, not exactly, but almost.........  We are not shown any calculations, so we have to take it all on trust.

There isn't any article either.  We are told that there will be one somewhere, all in good time........  Neither is there a published excavation report that we can look at.

This is all completely unsatisfactory, and it is extraordinary that the media have regurgitated a Wessex Archaeology story that has not been adequately scrutinized by anybody, or even peer reviewed prior to publication.

So archaeology continues on its downwards spiral, preoccupied with banner headlines and heroic personalities -- and convinced that the media will regurgitate almost anything to do with Stonehenge, even where there is no supporting evidence at all in the public domain.

Greenland 1962: the new video

You may have noticed that the Greenland video which I posted a few days ago has now gone, to be replaced by this one.  When we posted the video called "Nordvestfjord Adventure" YouTube didn't like it at all, because we were using a very obscure name that nobody ever searches for............

So we were told in no uncertain terms that we had to ditch the name and "rebrand" the video so as to be more in line with the YouTube algorithms.  So here we are -- the original video with a new identity, and with a few extra editorial tweaks.  Anyway, hope you like it.  Please share if you wish.

Greenland 1962: into the world’s longest fjord

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaF5J4KcQGw&t=25s

Greenland 1962: Into the world's longest fjord

 

Early glaciation ice rafting in the North Sea

Wroxham Crag deposits resting on chalk.  Bottom left is the modern beach.  

Location - Weybourne, Norfolk

This is a very interesting article that I missed in 2011 and came across in 2024:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2024/11/ice-rafted-erratics-norfolk.html 

Suddenly it seems to have considerable relevance.  Sadly, the full paper still seems to be behind a paywall.   

Possible ice-rafted erratics in late Early to early Middle Pleistocene shallow marine and coastal deposits in northeast Norfolk, UK.
Nigel R. Larkin, Jonathan R. Lee & E. Rodger Connell

Proc Geol Assoc 2011

https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/14695/1/Larkin_et_al.pdf

Abstract

Erratic clasts with a mass of up to 15 kg are described from preglacial shallow marine deposits (Wroxham Crag Formation) in northeast Norfolk. Detailed examination of their petrology has enabled them to be provenanced to northern Britain and southern Norway. Their clustered occurrence in coastal sediments in Norfolk is believed to be the product of ice-rafting from glacier incursions into the North Sea from eastern Scotland and southern Norway, and their subsequent grounding and melting within coastal areas of what is now north Norfolk. The precise timing of these restricted glaciations is difficult to determine. However, the relationship of the erratics to the biostratigraphic record and the first major expansion of ice into the North Sea suggest these events occurred during at least one glaciation between the late Early Pleistocene and early Middle Pleistocene (c. 1.1−0.6 Ma). In contrast to the late Middle (Anglian) and Late Pleistocene (Last Glacial Maximum) glaciations, where the North Sea was largely devoid of extensive marine conditions, the presence of far-travelled ice-rafted materials implies that earlier cold stage sea-levels were considerably higher.

The evidence for a high sea level is quite convincing, as is the evidence of shallow marine conditions, sea floor deposits and contained dropstones weighing up to 15 kg.  The erratics are from Northern England and Norway.  The stratigraphic relationships indicate that the deposits (in th Wroxham Crag Formation) date from an early glaciation maybe a million years ago.  Samples came from West Runton and Sidestrand.

Preferred explanation of the occurrence of these erratics in beach and estuarine conditions:  "the far-travelled clasts were deposited by melt-out from (possibly grounded) icebergs in estuarine (Sidestrand) and beach (West Runton) environments with minimal local reworking. It is predicated on parts of the BIIS and SIS in northern Britain and southern Norway having floating ice margins within the northern and eastern North Sea Basin, upstream of which ice was actively eroding and entraining bedrock lithologies. This hypothesis is supported by both the clustered spatial and stratigraphic concentration of the erratics, and their frequently comparatively ‘fresh’ form. An ice-wedge cast penetrating the host deposit at West Runton indicates that the subsequent climate was sufficiently cold to support the development of permafrost after deposition of the erratic-bearing sediments."

Conclusions

Concentrations of erratics within WCF coastal deposits at Sidestrand and West Runton in northern East Anglia are considered the product of melt-out from (possibly grounded) icebergs.

The provenance of the erratics implies that these icebergs were derived from glaciers that were eroding bedrock in the Southern Uplands, Midland Valley and southern Grampian Highlands of Scotland, and Oslofjord in southern Norway.

The age of these erratic-bearing beds can be broadly constrained to a period from the late Early Pleistocene to early Middle Pleistocene interval (c. 1.1–0.6 Ma, a time period that spans the ‘Menapian’ (MIS 34)) to late ‘Cromerian Complex’ (MIS 16) stages.

These erratics demonstrate both the existence of restricted glaciations in Scotland and Norway, and their periodic expansion into the North Sea Basin prior to the maximum extent of the ice sheets during the Anglian Glaciation (MIS 12) of the Middle Pleistocene.

This research supports the work of Sejrup et al. (1987) and Ekman (1999) that argues that both the BIIS and SIS were active in the North Sea Basin on at least one occasion well before the Anglian stage of the Middle Pleistocene.

The deposition of the erratic-bearing beds during these early glaciations appears to coincide with higher glacial sea-levels than occurred during the late Middle and Late Pleistocene.

Like the authors of the paper, I am intrigued by the glacio-isostatic and eustatic interactions here on the west side of the North Sea, where one would not expect ice rafting and the dumping of dropstones during one or more glacial episodes -- at times when relative sea levels would have been far below present msl.  But here the features are, suggesting GLACIAL sea levels not far removed from those of today..................  and the authors are clear in their own minds that the features relate to marine conditions, not glacio-lacustrine conditions.

For many years there has been a widsespread belief that the North Sea Basin as a whole has been sinking tectonically while the western part of the British Isles has been slowly rising.  This means that deposits currently at sea-level were deposited at an even HIGHER level around a million years ago.  All very confusing.

I am checking out the current views on this paper, which was published 15 years ago.........

The Ixer / Bevins "lumping" con

Oh dear -- yet another piece of "dusty box" geology from the infamous bluestone duo who like to call themselves the "pet rock boys".........

We have been here before -- many times:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2023/09/when-is-bluestone-not-bluestone.html

This 2026 item seems to be essentially the same as something previewed last year:
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2025/10/more-on-cunningtons-rock-samples-and.html

Ixer and Bevins just love digging out ancient slides made decades ago by other geologists who have been involved in Stonehenge digs, describing and classifying them and making yet more changes to their list of bluestone lithologies -- while in the process promoting their view that none of the erratic material in the Stonehenge landscape can ever have been anywhere near a glacier.

Anyway, this is the reference to the latest contribution:

William Cunnington's 1884 Stonehenge lithologies revisited
Rob A. Ixer, Richard E. Bevins, Duncan Pirrie, Matthew Power, Nick J.G. Pearce
Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine
1 Nov 2025

Abstract

The rediscovery in 2021 of 33 thin sections of mainly Stonehenge bluestones and the re-cataloguing of their associated rock specimens has allowed for a re-evaluation/re-examination and up-dating of William Cunnington’s 1884 ground-breaking account. All the major bluestone debitage groups are represented within the thin sections (other than Rhyolite Group E from orthostat Stone 48). The thin sections include the type material for the major Andesite Group A class of debitage (from Stone 32c) and single examples for the minor groups, namely the Altar Stone, Dacite Group D and a further example of orthostat Stone 38, the type sample for Dacite Group B debitage. Spotted and unspotted dolerites and Lower Palaeozoic Sandstone from within the stones and in the wider Stonehenge Landscape are also sampled. There is a lack of any other lithologies, the only non-local, non-bluestone materials are Greensand and sarsen.

The composition of the Cunnington bluestone assemblage as seen within the thin sections and by the rock specimens is the same as those collected in the 20th and 21st centuries and this is important as it was the last to be collected from the Stonehenge Landscape before significant human disturbance/contamination of the area; hence it represents a pristine lithological base line. The plethora of exotic erratic lithologies hoped for by others is totally absent.

Several points need to be made again.

1. The obsession with "modern contamination".  This is a typical straw man situation -- put something up just in order to knock it down.  The assertion that "modern contamination" is a major obstacle in the way of scientific accuracy or a widely held concern among Stonehenge researchers is a highly insular viewpoint.  For the vast majority of geologists and archaeologists working on Stonehenge, the landscape's modern gravel paths, car parks, and military camps were never considered a serious threat to working out the site's history.  The concept of a "pristine baseline" has no value.  In their re-examination of the William Cunnington archives, Ixer et al have used the phrase "pristine lithological baseline" to proactively bulletproof their own data. Because they were trying to provenance tiny flakes of debitage (rather than large, obvious standing stones), they framed Cunnington's 1880s collection as a "clean sample" to shut down any possible counter-arguments before they could be made. 

2.  This is all about lumping and splitting.  In geology, as in other disciplines, there are lumpers and splitters.  In their increasingly desperate attempts to support their human transport and monolithic quarrying hypothesis, Ixer and Bevins have systematically engaged in "lumping".  Their goal has been to show that the thousands of loose debitage flakes scattered around Stonehenge match a very restricted, narrow set of parent monoliths.  Obviously, if you can lump hundreds of disparate debitage fragments into just a few "coherent" groups, you can argue that they all came from a tiny number of precisely targeted human quarries. They assume, without any justification,  that all of the debitage has come from destroyed monoliths. This creates an illusion of neatness and strict human selection.  For example, in the Pont Saeson - Rhosyfelin area the debitage was initially deemed to contain various rhyolite subdivisions (Group A, Group B, Group C).  Ixer and Bevins then engaged in a prominent lumping exercise, combining these groups under a broader category to tie them directly to a single primary source -- which was then deemed to be a Neolithic monolith quarry.  They have done the same thing with the variable spotted dolerites from the Carn Goedog sill.  We should never forget that (a) there is no quarry at Rhosyfelin, and (b) that there is no matching foliated rhyolite monolith at Stonehenge.  There are similar problems with Group D albitised dacitic tuffs, altered gabbros, and a mixed bag of other volcanic fragments, limestones and sandstones.  Multiple rock types, and therefore multiple provenances

3.  On the matter of "spot provenancing" and the attempts to identify as small a number of actual monolith provenances as possible, Ixer and Bevins are essentially falsifying the record.  If you look beneath the label of any single Ixer/Bevins rock type or "group,"  the internal petrographic and geochemical variation turns out to be massive.  Within their single designated rock types, individual samples display wildly different internal fabric textures, mineral variations, altering degrees (like epidotisation or albitisation), and localized structures.   If a strict, unbiased "splitting" methodology is applied to the debitage, we end up with over 40 distinct rock types rather than a tidy handful. Many of these fragments—such as the highly altered gabbros, independent dacites, and unique sandstones—still cannot be matched to any surviving standing stone at Stonehenge.  Since the debitage types contain vast internal variation and include rocks that do not match the monument's orthostats, it heavily undermines the idea of clean, targeted human quarrying. Instead, it strongly implies multiple provenances.  As I never tire of pointing out (somebody has to do it) this degree of variation is exactly what you would expect from a glacier entraining detritus across a diverse volcanic landscape (like the Fishguard Volcanic Group terrain) and depositing a mixed bag of gravels, cobbles, and boulders on or near Salisbury Plain.  It also suggests that prehistoric builders weren't just bringing over perfectly uniform, prized pillars from two specific Welsh quarries. They were scavengers and opportunists who knew all about the minimisation of effort and cost - benefit analysis, as popinted out by Stephen Briggs.  Instead, they—or the glaciers that preceded them—were gathering a highly heterogeneous collection of "exotic" rocks from many different outcrops.  By lumping the rocks together, Ixer and Bevins enforce an artificial uniformity that obscures this geological variety, effectively fitting the data to support human transport while sweeping the inconveniently diverse "fingerprints" under a single taxonomic rug.

Very spotty dolerite at Carn Goedog

Very unspotty dolerite from Carn Goedog

4. The obsession with finding a "reslistically small" number of monolith provenances and quarries ignores a fundamental principle of sub-glacial geomorphology that completely upends the "quarry" narrative. Running through the work of Ixer and Bevins is a preoccupation with prominent, dramatic rock tors as the only possible source of megaliths.  This is  a profound misreading of how a moving ice sheet actually behaves, as I have pointed out in numerous posts.  The mainstream archaeological assumption is that if a stone more or less matches a specific rock formation, it must have been physically taken off the highest, most visible cliff face available.  The more prominent, the more sacred.  
Glacial geomorphology shows that the opposite to be true.  When a cold-based or thick ice sheet overrides a prominent rock tor, the ice is often frozen directly to the bedrock at the summit. This stagnant ice acts as a protective shield, preserving the tor's profile rather than destroying it.  In contrast, the deeper, lower-lying valleys and intervening depressions between the tors experience increased pressure and friction, leading to warm-based bottom melting, plucking and entrainment.  This  creates a highly varied trail of erratics.  This also explains why the chemical signatures of the Stonehenge debitage and the Waun Mawn stones are so untidy.

Carn Goedog -- eroded or protected by Irish Sea ice?

To conclude:  They say of the Stonehenge landscape "The plethora of exotic erratic lithologies hoped for by others is totally absent."  The plethora is there all right -- it's just that Ixer and his colleagues have chosen to ignore it in the context of a rather silly lumping stunt.

East coast erratics from Scandinavia and Scotland

Generalised directions of ice flow on the eastern side of Great Britain, interpreted from erratic finds and till characteristics.

Erratic finds on the east coast indicate that at various times ice from the Lake District and western Scotland flowed across the main watershed, on three main routes: via the Tweed Valley, the Tyne Gap and the Stainmore Gap.  It is inferred that there was a powerful southward-flowing ice stream from Scotland very close to the current coastline.

I'm intrigued by the modelling done by Chris Clark and his colleagues for the latest paper which floats the idea of long-distance glacial transport of the Stonehenge Altar Stone. 

The paper suggests that  southwards transport of ORS material from the far NE of Scotland might well have been possible -- but that the "footprint" of the ice stream involved would have been rather far offshore, out in the middle of the North Sea.  Probably the modelling showed ice from the Grampians and southern Scotland streaming down the east coast of England not far away from the present coastline.  Further, the model might be based in part on the presence of lineations on the sea floor.  We don't have a lot of detail on how the model was created.........

Anyway, one point of interest arising from this publication is the occurrence of Scandinavian and Scottish erratics in many locations on the east coast of England.  More than a century ago it was believed that Scandinavian erratice were abundant -- but there was a lot of mis-labelling and mis-identifications in the early days of erratic studies, and many of the boulders vand cobbles thought to have come from Oslofjord and the south coast of Norway are now believed to have come from Stotland and even northern England.

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

See the following:


Glaciodynamics of the central sector of the last British–Irish Ice Sheet
in Northern England
Stephen J. Livingstone, David J.A. Evans, Colm Ó Cofaigh, Bethan J. Davies, Jon W. Merritt,
David Huddart, Wishart A. Mitchell, David H. Roberts, Lynda Yorke

Earth-Science Reviews 111 (2012) 25–55

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

Finds from till etc on the "Ice Age Coast" (Hull Geological Society):

https://hullgeolsoc.co.uk/erratics4.htm

Igneous Rocks 

"Cheviot Porphyry"* (Cheviot Porpyrite of old surveys) - medium grained porphyry (smaller phenocrysts than Norwegian Porphyry) in a red, brown or black matrix. Always looks glossy as if it has been polished. Origin - ?Cheviot Hills.

Dolerite

Gabbro

Grey Granite  

Larvikite - coarse grained dark rock, shines blue in sunlight when wet. May have been described as Augite-Syenite in early boulder survey publications. Origin - Larvik in Norway.

Norwegian Porphyry - yellowish phenocrysts up to 1cm in a red-brown matrix. Phenocrysts may be zoned. Origin - Oslo Fjord in Norway

Peterhead Granite - looks a bit like Shap Granite but the orthoclase phenocrysts are more of a tinned-salmon pink and not as domino shaped.

Rapakivi Granite - origin Aaland

Rhyolite - reddish-brown fine grained igneous rock. May exhibit flow banding and contain small phenocrysts. Origin - ?Cheviot Hills.

Shap Granite - pale granite containing distinctive large crystals of pale pink orthoclase (like pink dominoes), sometimes with obvious simple twinning. It is difficult to identify in small specimens because you need to see the phenocrysts, so it may be under-reported. Origin - Shap in Cumbria. There is a large boulder near the base of Sewerby Steps that can be seen when it is not covered with sand. In older publications it may be called Shap Fells Granite.

Tilberthwaite Tuff - green fine grained rock, sometimes with current bedding, fining upwards bedding and volcanic bombs. This is a volcanic ash that fell into water and was later metamorphosed (so it is an igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock in one!) - Origin - Lake District.

"Whin Sill" * (Whinstone of older surveys) - medium grained almost black. Origin - northern England.

Sedimentary Rocks

Black Flint - hard, black, sharp if broken, may have a white cortex. Origin - Upper Campanian and Maastrictian of the North Sea and Holderness. "Rowe Formation". May containg fossils.

Black Shelly Carboniferous Limestone - pale brown shells in a black matrix which may weather to brown. Origin - midland valley of Scotland. Matrix may be bleached or weathered to a chocolate brown colour.

Brockram - a breccia, pieces of grey limestone (usually around 25mm across) in a dull red matrix.

Brown flint - dark gey brown, hard, breaks with a conchoidal fracture, with a paler brown cotex. Probably weathered Black Flint. Not so common in Yorkshire.

Brown ripple bedded sandstone - fairly fine grained pale sandstone with ripples picked out in darker brown

Carboniferous Limestone - dark grey limestone (Mountain Limestone in older surveys)

• Coral - packed with colonial corals

• Crinoidal

• ice scratched - polished and striated; evidence of grinding with other rocks within the glacier

 

Striated Carboniferous Limestone cobble

Carstone - phosphatic nodules from the Aptian, occasionally steinkerns of Jurassic fossils. . Found south of the Humber.

Cementstones - large (over 30cm), grey flattened nodules, usually septarian. Origin - mostly from the North Sea or Vale of Pickering.

• Kimmeridge* - darker grey than the Speeton Clay ones

• Speeton Clay - from the B Beds

Chalk - hard, very fine grained, white. Origin - Yorkshire Wolds or North Sea (see also Soft Chalk)

Dogger* - hard orange or red fine grained ironstone from the middle Jurassic often containing fossils

Flow banded porphyritic rhyolite (Dimlington) 

Frosterly Marble - dark grey to black Carboniferous Limestone with numerous large solitary corals. May be under-reported because you need ta large enough specimen to recognise it. Origin - Lower Carboniferous of Weardale.

Green Lake District conglomerate (a.k.a. "Ingleton Granite" or Greywacke Grit of old surveys) - a conglomerate with rounded clasts of quartz and other minerals up to 1 cm in size in a green matrix

Green sandstone - medium grained,

Grey Flint - from the Yorkshire Chalk. Pale or very pale grey, hard, foes not break with the conchoidal fracture you would normally "expect" for flint. Origin - Yorkshire Wolds or North Sea.

Jurassic plant bed (Esturine Sandstone of old surveys or Deltaic Sandstone) - pale grey, well bedded, mpstly quartz grains with some black plant remains.

Kimmeridge Clay - a dark grey shale often containing flattened white ammonites. Origin - Vale of Pickering or North Sea

Magnesian Limestone - quite hard, fine grained, creamy yellow colour.

Oxford Clay - grey or dark grey clay. Occasionally seen as "rafts" on the beach or in the cliff in the area around Aldborough. Origin - probably from the North Sea.

"New Red Sandstone" - medium to fine grained, with some mica, brick red colour. Origin - Permo-Trias of north west England.

"Old Red Sandstone" - medium to coarse grained, dull blood red colour. Origin - Devonian, perhaps Scotland.

Orange brown coarse sandstone - bright rusty brown colour, grains about 1-2mm, poorly cemented, may contain Tertiary foraminifera. Origin - probably from the North Sea.

Phosphate nodules - small pale brown nodules from the Speeton Clay, may contain fossils.

"Pink Chalk"* - hard, very fine grained, pink. It may not necessarily be from the "Red Chalk Formation", you would need to see distinctive fossils to be sure. Origin - North Sea and Yorkshire Wolds.

Red flint - hard, reddish brown, sharp if broken, may have a white cortex. Origin - perhaps the Danian of Denmark

Rhaxella Chert - found in Trent Valley and Norfolk, said to be from the Jurassic of the Howardian Hills (not recorded in Holderness)

Septarian nodules ( "turtle stones" ) - (see also Cement Stones)

Shelly Jurassic Limestone* - darkish grey limestone with fossils including Gryphaea, Lower Jurassic. Origin - North Yorkshire or the North Sea

Soft Chalk - white, putty-like. Can be seen in "rafts" in the cliffs. Origin - Upper Campanian and Maastrictian of the North Sea and Holderness. "Rowe Formation"

Speeton Clay - seen as "rafts" on top of the Chalk of the Flamborough area.

Red Flint - very hard, red-brown, sharp when broken, may have white cortex. Origin - perhaps the Danian of the North Sea and southern Scandinavia.

Tilberthwaite Tuff (see above under Igneous Rocks)

Metamorphic rocks -

Garnet mica schist - hard rock with sparkly muscovite and small red garnets. Occasionally you may find a version which is mostly biotite and garnets that crumbles when you try to collect it.

Gneiss

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

See also:

https://www.northfolk.org.uk/geology/erratics.html

and

Busfield, M.E., Lee, J.R., Riding, J.B., Zalasiewicz, J., Lee, S.V. 2015. Pleistocene till provenance in east Yorkshire: reconstructing ice flow of the British North Sea Lobe. Proceedings of the Geologist’s Association 126, 86-99

Map from Busfield et al, 2015

The main point arising from all of this is that there is substantial evidence of long-distance erratic transport broadly southwards along the east coasts of Scotland and England. Since abundant Scandinavian erratics have ended up in the coastal till and fluvioglacial deposits, there must have been at least one episode during which the ice of the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet dominated the ice of  the BIIS and entered the territory portrayed in the map above. 

It would therefore not be particularly surprising if some material from NE Scotland found its way into a southwards-flowing North Sea ice stream.

But why does Doggerland and Dogger Island need to come into the frame at all?  That is an unnecessary complication in the narrative, introduced entirely for the  purpose of demonstrating some human involvement in the movement of the Altar Stone..........

More fantasising on the Altar Stone

Suggested area (pink) across which Late Devensian erratics from northern Scotland might have been distributed. The map also shows the "footprint" of the Anglian glaciation, during which ORS erratics might have been carried even further southwards.

A very strange article has just been published, in the very respectable JQS journal which normally steers well clear of fantasies and speculations.  I'm rather surprised that it was accepted for publication, since it contains virtually no new data and builds yet more speculation onto an already very speculative narrative. In short, the article is filled with assumptions built on uncertainties, and the media coverage of it is completely bonkers.  Not surprisingly, some journalists flag up the "glacial transport" side of the story as an exciting discovery, while others claim that the human transport hypothesis is now proved.  Like the JQS article, it's all a bit of a mess.........

Here is the press release from Curtin University in Australia:

https://www.curtin.edu.au/news/media-release/study-details-epic-transportation-of-stonehenge-stone-across-ancient-britain/

The article:

Clarke, A. J. I., Veness, R. L. J., Kirkland, C. L., Clark, C. D., Gandy, N., Emery, A. et al. (2026) From Highlands to Henge: Refining the Provenance and Transport Pathways of Stonehenge's Altar Stone. Journal of Quaternary Science, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.70080

 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jqs.70080

ABSTRACT:

The Altar Stone, the 6000 kg central sandstone megalith at Stonehenge in southern England, is suggested to have originated from the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland, some 700 km away. However, its source location within this large basin remains unresolved and its mode of transport uncertain. Proposed mechanisms include Neolithic human transport via marine or overland routes or southward movement as a glacial erratic. Here, we combine sandstone provenance analysis with ice flow modelling to constrain potential sources and transport pathways. Ice sheet reconstructions show that southward transport vectors from northeast Scotland were highly localised, making precise source determination critical to evaluating glacial erratic transport plausibility. Candidate source areas farther south within the Orcadian Basin are more compatible with southward glacial dispersal, but show weaker correspondence with the detrital zircon age spectra that characterise the Altar Stone. By contrast, sandstones from Caithness on the mainland of northeast Scotland provide the closest match in zircon age structure; yet, modelled glacial transport from this region is predominantly towards the north‐east, with a localised south‐eastward pathway directed towards Dogger Bank. Glacial dispersal to Dogger Bank would reduce the anthropogenic transport distance required to Stonehenge from 700 km to 400 km. However, such a model raises an additional temporal problem, as Dogger Bank was inundated by post‐glacial sea‐level rise before the Altar Stone likely arrived at Stonehenge. Glacial transport may have provided an intermediate stage in the stone's journey, but alone cannot account for the final emplacement on Salisbury Plain. Even under a glacially assisted scenario, substantial anthropogenic transport would have remained necessary.

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

Right from the outset there is bias that should have been picked up by the referees. In their introductory paragraph the authors refer to "three lithologies" in the "building block" collection at Stonehenge, specifically creating a seperate category for the Altar Stone.  Ixer and Bevins, for reasons that are not difficult to discern, decided not so long ago that the Altar Stone should no longer be referred to as a "bluestone" but should be dignified by the creation of a new rock category.  There is no earth science logic to that, since the bluestones (of all shapes and sizes) found in the Stonehenge landscape do not all come from Mynydd Preseli, and the Altar Stone is not the only sandstone.  If we look at the sarsens and the erratic bluestones around Stonehenge, there are scores of lithologies represented, and ORS sandstone is just one of them.

This labelling device, right at the beginning of the article simply flags up the authors' specific intention to demonstrate that the Altar Stone was not just special or sacred, but that it was even more sacred than the bluestones.

In mentioning that Parker Pearson's Waun Mawn "lost bluestone circle" has been criticised, they cite Darvill (2022) who refuted the hypothesis on archaeological grounds, but they fail to cite my much more comprehensive 2024 criticism and dismissal (in the "Holocene" journal) of the MPP narrative on earth science grounds.  One might have expected an acknowledgement of this in an article published in JQS..............

In referring to monolith transport, the authors refer to the glacial theory, but say "recent detrital zircon–apatite fingerprinting of Salisbury Plain river sediment found no evidence that glacial processes delivered the bluestones to southern England (Clarke and Kirkland, 2026)".  It would have been more honest for the lead authors to state that their own zircon study is deeply defective, since the findings are based on just four river sand samples (accepted as valid without any refence to sampling procedures) and a lack of any control studies.  This and other defects were discussed in another post on this blog:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2026/03/probable-bias-in-zircon-apatite.html

We have similar problems with the other key samples used by Clarke and others in their studies of the Altar Stone.  All 4 of them -- from Stonehenge, Orkney and Caithness -- are surrogate samples, not collected by the authors during fieldwork but taken from second hand sources:

ALTAR STONE
1 National Museum of Wales ( assumed to have been excavated Hawley in the 1920s)
2 Salisbury Museum (assumed to have been collected from the underside of the Altar Stone in 1844)

ORCADIAN BASIN SAMPLES
Two Old Red Sandstone rock samples from the Orcadian Basin, bought from Natural Wonders Ltd, Whitby:
1 Cruaday, Orkney
2 near Spittal, Caithness

The Altar Stone samples are simply assumed to be truly representative of the Altar Stone itself -- but if that attribution is faulty, then this article, like several others, becomes nonsensical.  Given this fundamental research defect, why on earth did not one or another of the authors actually pop up north for a few days with a geological hammer and collect some proper, fully authenticated, rock samples?

Anyway, on a more positive note I welcome and agree with the paragraph on erratic transport routes and with the point that glacial erratics take thousands of years to be transported within the ice, during which ice flow vectors can shift in direction.

Quote:

This motivated us to model trajectories of glacial erratics, accounting for such shifting flow vectors over time to yield predictions of transport routes and distance. A complicating factor is that the Orcadian Basin sat near the ice sheet's north–south ice drainage divide (>1 km thick at times). Small movements (tens of kilometres) of this ice divide, as the ice sheet fluctuated, could have transported boulders in a multitude of directions. An investigation of the possible time-integrated flow routes is thus warranted to explore the plausibility of southward transport as an erratic. The key here is that rather than considering a single ice transport vector, we now examine if the Altar Stone could have first been transported in one direction and later in another as ice flow directions shifted. Could such multistage ice transport have carried the Altar Stone closer to Salisbury Plain? Given the complexity of ice flow directions in the region, refining likely locations of the source area is crucial to exploring this time-integrated ice flow analysis of possible erratic pathways.

This is fine, and could also, of course,  be applied to the west coast of Scotland in our attempts to discover how erratics apparently from the Western Isles might have been transported to the coasts of the Bristol Channel.  Indeed, I have already cited another article by Veness and others in a recent post about Scottish erratic trails.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2026/05/scottish-erratics-and-irish-sea-ice.html

In the discussion of "detrital zircon data sets" from the Orcadian basin and elsewhere, the authors present no new fieldwork and no new samples.  They depend entirely on the published work of other authors, and their conclusions are therefore based on pre-selected data sets, with a vast expanse of ORS sandstone territory unsampled and effectively ignored.  This represents yet another powerful bias in the work.

On the matter or erratic trains, the authors suggest -- in line with BRITICE and other modelling work -- that erratics derived from Caithness and Orkney are unlikely to have found their way to the Dogger Bank during the Late Devensian Glaciation (LGM), but that they might have travelled south if they had previously been emplaced by eastward-flowing ice in (for example) the Wolstonian or Anglian Glaciation and then later entrained by a southward flowing ice stream.  On the other hand ORS erratics from New Aberdour or the Inverness area could well have been entrained on the south side of an ice shed and transported southwards to the Dogger Bank.    In other words, the modelling work suggests that the Inverness and New Aberdour areas are more likely to have provided Dogger bank erratics than outcrops in Caithness or Orkney.  I have no problem with any of that, except to say that other outcrops of ORS around the Midland Valley Basin were even more likely to have provided erratics for the southward-flowing ice stream in the North Sea. 

In the section of the article entitled "Human and ice transport?" the authors seem to lose touch with reality.  First, they accept that the Stonehenge landscape "lacks the detrital signature expected from direct glacial delivery of megalith-derived material from northeast Scotland".  They cite Clarke and Kirkland 2026, but (as mentioned above) they fail to appreciate that their conclusion is highly contentious, having been based on just four sand samples about which we know virtually nothing.  Clarke and Kirkland are joint authors of the article which we are scrutinizing.......... enough said.

 Then the authors embark on a series of speculations on "human agency" in the movement of the Altar Stone from Dogger Bank to Stonehenge which are so bizarre as to be embarrassing.  How this section got through the refereeing process, maybe we will never know........

They suggest that Dogger Bank might have been a "topographic high point in the landscape" which might have held some cultural significance for Palaeolithic or Mesolithic inhabitants. They then suggest that the Altar Stone, found as an erratic, must have been special or sacred enough to justify collection and transport towards Stonehenge via maritime and land-based pathways three thousand years before it was incorporated into the Stonehenge monument.  Talk about forward planning.........!!!

The idea of Dogger Island and its sacred stone -- seized upon, of course, by the media -- is so absurd that even our old friend MPP might be worried about it!  There is no evidence at all that Palaeolithic or Mesolithic tribesmen in the period 9,000 - 7,000 BP had either the desire or the capability to move a six-tonne slab of rock from one place to another in Doggerland or anywhere else.  As far as I am aware, there are no Palaeolithic of Mesolithic standing stones anywhere in Europe.  At the time of Dogger Island's final inundation, and indeed for millenia before that, this was a densely wooded landscape of rivers, lagoons, bogs, fens and marshes -- good hunting, fishing and gathering territory.  But I think we can safely dismiss the idea that the inhabitants knew that their island world was going to disappear, and that they planned and executed a move westwards for a large sacred stone while the going was good.  Of course the media love this sort of narrative, but it's completely bonkers.  

The "Dogger Bank scenario" involves "prolonged cultural significance or multiple-phase activity, across an exceptionally large temporal gap" -- but the authors also suggest that the boulder might have been moved south-westwards from the North Sea coast during the Anglian Glaciation and then dumped somewhere near the Chilterns ice edge.  This would have involved a relatively short "anthropogenic transport route" along the Berkshire Ridgeway towards Stonehenge.  In yet another scenario the authors suggest that the Altar Stone might have been ice-rafted through the Strait of Dover following one or another of the envisaged mega-floods, and then dumped somewhere on the south coast of England.  That's a remote possibility, but before taking it too seriously we need to know much more about pre-Devensian glacio-isostatic adjustments and sea-level changes.

In summary, this is a very strange article.  While I welcome the fact that some authors are at least taking the idea of long-distance glacial erratic transport seriously, the scenarios examined in the article all involve the human transport of a large bluestone monolith -- the Altar Stone.  I'm still highly sceptical about that, and I think that the authors here have accepted far too easily that the Altar Stone did indeed come from the far NE of Scotland.  I do not think that has been proved. 

Clarke and Kirkland have rushed into print far too early.  Their sampling and the use of surrogate samples suggests substantial bias.   If I am to be convinced by their provenancing, I would like to see the lead authors of this piece get out into the field, collecting samples from many ORS locations in various parts of Scotland, specifically for the testing of their hypothesis.  Once they have done that, and published their test results, I might be prepared to abandon my scepticism about the quality of their work.

See also Mike Pitts, who compounds the confusion:

https://mikepitts.wordpress.com/2026/06/05/stonehenge-altar-stone-glaciers/