The Stonehenge bluestones and our heroic ancestors: time to stop flogging the dead horse

OK -- the time has come for the Stonehenge establishment, and a vast array of academics from assorted disciplines, to stop this seemingly endless search for evidence in support of a wild fantasy invented by HH Thomas in 1923.  Before 1923, most experts accepted that the stone monument at Stonehenge was built of an assortment of stones, some large and others smaller,  some local and others from far away, that happened to be lying around in the landscape.  Geologists argued that some of the stones had come from the west, and that they had probably been transported by glacier ice.  For a variety of reasons already enumerated on this blog, Thomas wanted a much more complex and heroic narrative, and he falsified the known evidence of glacial activity in the Bristol Channel in order to support his story of long-distance bluestone transport by humans as "the only reliable alternative".  That became, in no time at all, the ruling hypothesis, and for a century academics from many different disciplines have desperately been trying to confirm it.  Without success.  There is still not a shred of hard evidence to show that there was any link between Stonehenge and Preseli, apart from a few small traded objects such as those that might link any two small parts of a large island........

After an investment of thousands of hours of research time and the expenditure of many millions of pounds of taxpayers money, it's time for academics to get real and for the research funding organizations to stop throwing good money after bad.

Just a reminder of where we are.  There are no strong cultural links between West Wales and Stonehenge; as demonstrated by Wainwright and Darvill, the megalithic structures demonstrate instead a strong link between West Wales, North Wales and Ireland.  There is no evidence that bluestones were revered or used preferentially in West Wales in monument construction.  There is no evidence of strong trading links or social connections between Stonehenge and Preseli.  Although we now know approximately where many of the bluestones at Stonehenge might have come from, the claims made by Bevins and Ixer about precise "spot provenencing" are unacceptable and unreliable.  There are no bluestone monolith  quarries at Rhosyfelin, Carn Goedog or anywhere else, and it is in any case bizarre to think in terms of quarrying activity or even "extraction points" for all of the many bluestone types represented at Stonehenge.     (The only bluestone quarry known to the author is near the summit of Foel Drygarn, where small slabs were collected for use in burial mounds and defensive structures, starting in the Bronze Age.  )

There is no evidence of haulage routes, trackways, ropes, sledges, rafts or boats that might have been used   in a multi-generational stonen haulage operation.  The idea promoted by Parker Pearson of a "lost stone circle" at Waun Mawn which was linked to Stonehenge has been systematically dismantled by many reviewers, and is now quite rightly abandoned.

Finally, in one last desperate attempt to demonstrate that the sequence of land use, landscape change and settlement in Preseli was somehow linked to a Stonehenge chronology,  Parker Pearson and co-workers in a new article have demonstrated instead that the people of the far west had not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, what was going on over on Salisbury Plain:     

Spencer, D. E., Molloy, K., Pearson, M. P., Fyfe, R., & Potito, A. (2025). Prehistoric Landscape Change Around the Sources of Stonehenge’s Bluestones in Preseli, Wales. Environmental Archaeology, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741

Isotope work, pollen analyses, radiocarbon dates and other indicators of  environmental change and cultural linkages have also failed to turn up anything that might help to confirm the ruling hypothesis, whatever claims there may have been to the contrary.

As suggested by Stephen Briggs many moons ago, the prehistoric tribal groups of West Wales were opportunists and pragmatists who quietly got on with life,  no doubt with trading contacts in all compass directions but blissfully unaware of the existence of Stonehenge and other monuments which were far, far away over distant horizons.  The locations of megalithic monuments were determined above all else by the availability of stone resources -- in rock outcrops, scree accumulations, blockfields and glacial erratic scatters.   And as suggested by Barclay and Brophy, the network of contacts was essentially local, determined above all else by local geography and resource distribution and with occasional forays further afield -- with no sign at all of  centralised organization or political power exerted from Wessex, Salisbury Plain or Stonehenge.  Parker Pearson's fantasies on this front just do not withstand scrutiny.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2023/01/deterministic-and-opportunistic-stone.html

The truth is a foreign country.  A somewhat imaginative AI image published by RJL on his blog.........

Prehistoric Landscape change around Preseli. New paper shows nothing new.

I'm not able to get at this because it is behind a paywall, but I'm not losing any sleep over it, because it clearly shows that Preseli was not abandoned or depopulated at all, following the presumed export of the bluestones.  It was a daft idea anyway -- one of a host of daft ideas promoted by our oild friend MPP over the years.  The "pastoral indicators" indicated for the Early and Middle Neolithic were perfectly predictable and clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with Stonehenge or the bluestones, and it would be flying in the face of common sense to pretend otherwise.

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Prehistoric Landscape Change Around the Sources of Stonehenge’s Bluestones in Preseli, Wales

Daisy Eleanor Spencer, Karen Molloy, Mike Parker Pearson, Ralph Fyfe & Aaron Potito.
Environmental Archaeology 2025, Received 29 Apr 2025, Accepted 09 Oct 2025, Published online: 19 Oct 2025

https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741

ABSTRACT

This palaeoenvironmental investigation into prehistoric landscape change was set in the Preseli region of Pembrokeshire, west Wales from where Stonehenge’s bluestones originate. It aimed to investigate whether the movement of bluestones to Stonehenge, considered to have formed Stonehenge’s first stage c. 3000 BC, was accompanied by an out-migration of people, leaving the Preseli region largely uninhabited in succeeding centuries until c. 2200 BC. Potentially, this might be reflected in the palaeoecological record by a reduction in anthropogenic land-use indicators. Detailed analyses that involved pollen, macrofossil, non-pollen palynomorph (NPP), loss-on-ignition (LOI550) and stratigraphical investigations of multipleö core sequences from heathland on the slopes of the Preseli Hills, in combination with archaeological spot samples from five prehistoric sites in the locality, were undertaken. This multi-core and multi-site approach has allowed for an interpretation of local environmental change from the Early Holocene to the Late Bronze Age. An insight into human population dynamics has been gained in an area where palaeoecological investigations have traditionally been hampered by a lack of deep peat sequences. The Mesolithic and Neolithic were largely dominated by woodland species while increases in pastoral indicators began during the Early – Middle Neolithic contemporary with activity at important bluestone sites. Significant expansion of pastoral and arable farming did not occur until the Late Bronze Age. However, despite a scarcity of archaeological remains from c. 3000–2200 BC, the presence of cereal pollen during this interval hints at a continued human presence in the landscape after the transportation of the bluestones.

The glacial transport of the bluestones: the glorious irrationality of the Stonehenge establishment

The "traditional" map of known ice movement directions as it was around 1900.  In several sectors subsequent research has shown a more extensive ice cover.  HH Thomas must have known this map, but chose to misrepresent it.  The evidence base for ice movements on the western flank of Great Britain has always been stronger than the evidence base for the east coast.

As far as I can see, the latest suggestion relating to the glacial transport of the Altar Stone from northern Scotland to the Dogger Bank has been broadly accepted by the Stonehenge archaeology establishment.  At least, nobody has come out in opposition to the idea, although there have been a few murmurs about the rather fanciful Dogger Bank / Dogger Island part of the narrative.

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

So we now have a "hybrid theory" for the east coast of Great Britain, with the acceptance of the idea that the Altar Stone may well be a large glacial erratic, transported on at least part of its journey by south-flowing glacier ice.  There are no other known ORS monoliths on Salisbury Plain that can be matched to the Altar Stone, and there is no known erratic trail from A to B.  As noted by Clarke et al, it might be there, but if it is there it is very conveniently situated on the floor of the North Sea.......... out of sight and out of mind. So the speculation cannot be contradicted by hard evidence.

Now we come to the entertaining bit.  Over the course of more than a century geologists like Judd, Kellaway and Williams-Thorpe have argued that something similar happened on the west coast of Great Britain, with the Irish Sea Ice Stream transporting a wide array of glacial erratics from sources along its known route and dumping some of them on the floor of the Bristol Channel and others above present sea level on the coasts of South Wales, Devon,  Cornwall and Somerset. Ice movement directions are well known, and erratic provenances are broadly agreed by the experts. The evidence is well described in the literature, and is undisputed by glacial geomorphologists.  

But it is bizarre,  to put it mildly, that archaeologists -- and especially those who are influential in Stonehenge circles -- insist that the glacial transport of the bluestones was impossible, basing that outrageous belief on a very dodgy statement by HH Thomas back in 1923 that the ice of the Irish Sea Glacier could not have extended much further than the coast of South Pembrokeshire.  He invented the human transport hypothesis, and a large part of the academic establishment and the Stonehenge media machine has promoted that as "the truth" ever since.

On the basis of Thomas's dishonesty the human transport of the bluestones has been ruthlessly promoted as "the only story that makes sense", with MPP and his colleagues developing an ever more complex and fanciful narrative (involving quarries, lost stone circles etc) and with the backing of geologists like Bevins and Ixer, who should be ashamed of themselves.  The bandwaggon has also made room for one or two geomorphologists, who shall be nameless.

So the glacial transport of large lumps of rock is OK off the east coast, but not off the west coast.  This is hilarious, pathetic, outrageous and reprehensible in equal measure.

The only story that respects the evidence and makes sense is the hybrid one, involving glacial erosion, entrainment and erratic transport as part one of the bluestone monolith journey, and then human transport for the last part of the journey from several locations yet to be discovered, through to Stonehenge.  Those locations WILL be found, and that is where future research should be concentrated.

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Quote from one of my earlier posts:
All things considered, the accumulated evidence shows that by 1910 the broad outlines of glaciation in the Bristol Channel / Celtic Sea arena were already established, involving thick and active ice carrying erratics and other glacial materials from the NW across Pembrokeshire and up the Bristol Channel, affecting the coasts of South Wales and the South-West Peninsula. In making his claims about the impossibility of bluestone transport towards Stonehenge HH Thomas wilfully ignored a great amount of evidence in the printed literature, and wilfully misrepresented the opinions of senior "glacialists". It is quite extraordinary that he got away with it -- but that, maybe, was because he was a geologist talking to archaeologists or antiquarians. If he had been a geologist talking to other geologists, he would certainly not have got away with it. They would have had his guts for garters.

Shoreline ice accumulations in the Nares Strait

 

These slides are from the film "Beneath the Polar Sun" -- relating an attempt about ten years ago by a group of experienced kayakers to navigate the full length of the Nares Strait between North Greenland and Axel Heiberg Island.  They expected to find flat ice floes and intersecting navigable leads of clear water;  what they found was a nighmare of smashed ice fragments and brash ice stretching from horizon to horizon, with huge pressure ridges on long stretches of the shoreline.  They expected to travel 300 km. but gave up after 30 km of unremitting toil.

Ever since David Sugden and I wrote our extended report called "Coastal Geomorphology of High Latitudes" many years ago, I have been intrigued by the physical variations that exist in the real world of marine limits and raised shorelines.  There is quite enough variation is it is, on coasts where processes are determined by relatively ice-free conditions -- but things get vastly more complex where brash ice fragments or bergy bits are stranded on the shore.

Where an ice foot (or fringe of landfast sea ice) exists, there is considerable variation, partly dependent on the amount of brash ice or bergy bits incorporated -- derived from glaciers and icebergs.  And there is more variation again in freshwater environments like the shores of the Great Lakes, where much frazil ice may be incorporated, and where spectacular spring floods occur, such as in the St Lawrence and Mackenzie Rivers when the winter ice is flushed out with dramatic and sometimes catastrophic consequences.  Similar catastrophic spring floods also occur in the lower parts of the great  north-flowing Siberian rivers -- the Yenisei, Lena and Ob.  

In Antarctic raised beaches we often see pits and ridges on the pebble banks, with rapid lateral variations in beach sediments including particle size.  Bulldozed or pushed ridges of beach material are evidence of vast ice pressure on the shoreline associated with tidal streams or onshore winds;  accumulations of brash ice and pack ice fragments may be piled up to heights of 20m above HWM, forming more or less impenetrable barriers to access and causing damage to coastal infrastructure.  

One of our biggest fears when paddling om Nordvestfjord in 1962 was that an onshore wind might push all of the floating ice fragments in the fjord tight up against the shoreline, trapping us either inside or ourside the barrier.  Being trappped on the inside was preferable, but not to be welcomed.  But being trapped on the outside of a brash ice barrier was potentially lethal, since our canvas kayaks could not have coped with any attempt to paddle though it, and and neither could we have walked across it to the shore..........

The strange case of the missing Bulford post holes.......

Andy's attempts to fit assorted known pits at Bulford to a summer solstice line 

I refer to  a Facebook post by Andy Burnham (no, not that one --the other one) based on one of his Magalithic Portal posts.  Reprinted below with acknowledgement.

 I think it's fair to say that there is growing disquiet about the "summer solstice" post holes which Phil Harding claims to have found at Bulford in a dig that was completed almost a decade ago.  All very mysterious.  Andy is careful not to suggest, even very obliquely,  that the post holes do not exist, or that Phil has simply invented them, but it's very strange that nobody noticed, at the time of the dig or at the time of the Matt Lievers report in 2021, that there were two holes bigger and  different from all the others in their characteristics and which happened to lie on the (approximate) solar solstice alignment.......

Anjd why the emphasis on the exact 120m spacing? Is Phil suggesting that our clever ancestors were faliliar with the metric system of measurement?

It's too late now for anybody to go and check the evidence (which has in any case not been published) because there is now a housing estate on the site........

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A fascinating midsummer solstice story as you no doubt saw - never has more excitement been generated over some Neolithic pits due to the Stonehenge connection and the careful 'silly season' timing. A deeper dive into what we know so far. Wessex Archaeology announced...

 1.  an alignment of two timber posts at Bulford, 120m apart, pointed to midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset ~2950 BCE - a "prototype" solstice marker 500 years before the Stonehenge one. In the absence of the full publication I had a look at what's out there on the record. 

2.   This isn't a new dig. The Bulford pits were excavated in 2015-17 and published by Matt Leivers in 2021 (Internet Archaeology 56, free to read and very interesting). Linked at the end of this thread. The recent announcement seems to be a fresh reading of these same features.

 3.  Much was already in that paper: 48 pits on the hilltop dated ~2950 BCE, feasting debris and scatter leaning east towards Sidbury Hill. The solar interest was already on record. Even the star find. The "rare disc-shaped knife" now presented as a possible image of the sun's disc which is very easy to be sceptical about! - listed simply as "a discoidal knife" among the pit finds.

4.   But here's the gap. The structure actually being announced - two posts, 120m apart, on the solstice line - isn't described in the 2021 paper at all. 

5.  The post features Leivers does describe at Bulford don't match it: they're several centuries later (~2470-2570 BCE, not 2950) and much closer together (the nearest large pair about 64m apart, not 120m). Presumably there is now earlier dating for the two large 'alignment' pits

 6.  What is rather odd is how those two large pits were missed - Phil Harding spotted them from the unpublished work. 

7.  I tried to find the two posts on the published plan. I can't. (See the original post).  Every pit is shown as the same small dot, with 48 packed onto one hilltop. I plotted some 120m lines on the 50 degree solstice bearing - you can align this through dozens of pit pairs by chance... 

8.  So there's no picking the proposed aligned pair off the plan - far too many fit, and we're deliberately not proposing one. The actual two posts must have been singled out in the dig as large, deep post-holes, and that evidence just isn't on the published figure. 

9.  None of which makes it wrong of course - the setting is real, the date is real, the solstice bearing checks out. It's plausible and a comfortable fit with what's known - it's just running ahead of the published evidence presumably for the sake of that solstice announcement.

 10.  And fair play to them for getting the excitement in early - the detail is promised in a forthcoming Army Basing Programme volume (free via Wessex Archaeology's Open Library) and a Prehistoric Society piece. Until then it can't really be checked.

 11.  We await the publication with great interest. More on our new page for the the Bulford Neolithic Pits and Alignment which shows what must be the location for the alignment https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=63957 

12.  The location of the pits and alignment is close to the very nicely reconstructed henges which you can visit here: https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=60365 

13.   There's more in my forum post on the current gaps in the interpretation: https://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=Forum&file=viewtopic&topic=10434&forum=4  

14.  Here is the very interesting 2021 paper our pages were all based on, from Matt Leivers, which also discusses potential alignments on the Stonehenge cursus:  Stonehenge and the Emergence of the Sacred Landscape of Wessex Internet Archaeology 56. 

https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue56/2/index.html 

Why the regional marine limit (highest shoreline) is difficult to find

 

I came across this fabulous oblique aerial shot the other day, of part of the coast of Svalvbard.  I have labelled some of the features.

In the early days of our careers, David Sugden and I became quite good at finding the regional marine limit as we hoofed around in the landscape.  We discovered one marine limit at 134m in Kjove Land, East Greenland, in 1962, and then another one at the staggering  altitude of 275m at Noel Hill in the South Shetland Islands in Antarctica in 1966.  The altitudes were fixed with the most primitive surveying instruments coupled with barometric checks.  There were no detailed maps, and no GPS instruments in those far-off days.......

In the period since we did our fieldwork, as far as we know nobody has found higher marine traces in our fieldwork areas, or corrected our altitudes.

The marine limit in a glaciated landscape subject to isostatic adjustment or tectonic uplift is notoriously difficult to find.  The reason is explained in the photo above.  At the end of a glacial episode, as ice wastage speeds up and as isostatic uplift kicks in, very little of the coastline is initially subject to wave attack and other coastal processes.  That is becaused of the protection afforded to the coastline by a band of landfast perennial sea ice -- sometimes called the "ice foot".  It's very clear in the photo.  In the deepest valleys or fjords, flowing glaciers with floating snouts effectively protect coastal solid rock outcrops, and in other embayments seasonal sea ice may also afford protection.  We can see this situation at the left edge of the photo.

In the photo only one small coastal stretch is in contact with the open sea -- and this is where a range of coastal processes can operate -- just for a short time if isostatic or tectonic uplift rates are high.  So on the ground today we may find washed surfaces, small pebble banks or simply till deposits from which some of the finer sediments have been removed by wave action.  I recall many intense discussions with Dave while we tried to piece together the clues!  And because of the relatively great age of these high beach remnants, they have of course also been modified by post-glacial slope processes and frost shattering.

In the case of the South Shetland Islands, there was reasonable evidence of a short-lived ice advance over the marine shoreline traces.  It was clearly not very powerful, since the traces were well preserved.  Some have suggested that the "residual raised beach" that we described may be Plio-Pleistocene in age;  I disagree with that, since the remnants are so close to an ice edge that they cannot possibly have survived for that long, during multiple expansions and contractions of the  King George Island ice cap or indeed the regional ice sheet cover.  On the other hand, away from the areas of distinct ice streaming, island ice caps can expand to cover pereviously ice-free areas and can actually protect them.  So, on balance, in my 1971 paper I suggested that the Noel Hill resudual beach may well date from the last interglacial......... Eemian or Ipswichian.

Thus far, nobody, as far as I know, has managed to date these "high level" raised marine features which David and I described in our big paper in 1971........

See also:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-noel-hill-residual-raised-beach.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-myth-of-ice-rafted-coastal-erratics.html

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.