West Angle Quaternary exposures

 

This is a nice oblique aerial photo of West Angle Bay, taken fairly recently by a drone camera.  The rocky embayments in the middle and left foreground hold a number of exposures of  Late Devensian (LGM) till and periglacial deposits.  The main bay, right of centre, holds one of the most important Quaternary sequences in Wales.  Between the sandy beach and the big caravan park there used to be a brick pit -- now largely destroyed, partly infilled with rubble.  On the seaward edge of this brick pit there was a wonderful exposure of Quaternary sediments, including last Interglacial (Eemian / Ipswichian) silts, clays and peaty beds, and a sequence of glaciasl and periglacial sediments related to the LGM ice advance across western Pembrokeshire.

We get a nice impression from this photo of the quiet estuarine environment that must have existed in this embayment and through valley during the last interglacial.

I have multiple posts about this site, concentrating on the controversy of the Pre-Ipswichian glacial deposit.  DQ Bowen and others claim to have seen it, and so the site has been used by BGS as a "type locality" for the Penfro Till formation.  This is a huge mistake, perpetrated to this day in the literature.  Dave Unwin and I are the only two people to have excavated this site properly, and we found no trace of any till beneath the raised beach.  Other casual observers at this site have failed to recognize the extent to which glacial tectonics have redistributed slabs of sediment. Bits and pieces of peat beds and interglacial sediments have been detasched and thrust over parts of the Devensian glacial sequence, in effect inverting the key layers.  See my posts for further information:

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1228690739485734684/1824604806378202597

Carn Meini / Carn Menyn -- where some of the bluestones might have come from

 

I've been doing a few water colours recently, and this one is an impression of Carn Meini, seen from near the Waldo Williams memorial stone.  The skyline arrangement of crags is rather impressive -- and of course this " dominance" of the landscape was one of the reasons why Herbert Thomas, Atkinson and more recently Darvill and Wainwright argued that Carn Meini must have been s "special place" for our ancestors -- and therefore worthy of providing "special stones" destined for Stonehenge.

That theory took a bit of a knock when Bevins and Ixer suggested that none of the spotted dolerites at Stonehenge came from here -- their location of preference was Carn Goedog, on the northern flank of the upland ridge.  I'm not sure that a Carn Meini source for some rock fragments has been entirely ruled out, since there are great petrological variations within the many Carn Meini outcrops.  And of course Darvill and Wainwright persisted with their belief that this site was more important to the Neolithic tribesmen than Carn Goedog......... no matter what the geologists might have said in their papers.......

Preseli roches moutonnees.......

 

Thanks to Hugh 360 for this photo, showing very beautifully the very large roche moutonnees that dominate the northern flank of Mynydd Preseli.  On the mountainside here we can see Carn Alw, Foel Drygarn, and Carn Goedog.  This is a clear indication of ice flow from the north -- probably during the course of several glaciations.  I think the capacity for the creation of large-scale erosional features was rather limited during the Devensian -- so probably we are looking at the results of more prolonged ice inundation during the Wolstonian and Aglian glacial episodes.

The Preseli landscape change paper scrutinized: another MPP hypothesis bites the dust

This is getting embarrassing.  The framing of the prehistory of Pembrokeshire as "an essential component of the Stonehenge narrative" always was absurd, but now, surely, it has to be consigned to the scrap heap.  Archaeologists working in West Wales always were worried about it, but by and large they have maintained a stoical silence, cowed by the immense power and influence of people like Richard Atkinson, Geoffrey Wainwright and Mike Parker Pearson..........

One after another, the hypotheses of external influence have been dismissed in the peer-reviewed literature.  First, the Craig Rhosyfelin "Stonehenge megalith quarry" flagged up as "the Pompeii of prehistoric stone quarries" and then shown to be just a figment of a fertile imagination.  Then the spotted dolerite "megalith quarry" at Carn Goedog, also flagged up as a massive industrial complex and then shown to be nothing more than a dolerite tor affected by assorted cold climate processes.  Then the magnificent "lost stone" circle at Waun Mawn, given the full treatment as the last piece of the Stonehenge jigsaw puzzle in an appalling TV documentary and then dismissed with disdain by Tim Darvill and many others.  The stone circle never existed.  Now comes the hypothesis of West Wales population decline following the removal of 80 bluestones monoliths from Preseli, via Waun Mawn, to Stonehenge during the late Neolithic.  That too bites the dust following the publication of this new study.

When you use wildly extravagant phraseology like "the IKEA of Neolithic quarries", "the original Stonehenge", "monolith extraction on an industrial scale", "proto-Stonehenge" and "a monument of unification" you are asking for trouble, especially if your evidence is so thin that it does not withstand scrutiny.........

Anyway, back to the new pollen analysis / landscape change paper.  Thanks to Daisy Spencer for sending me the PDF.  It's a real curate's egg of a paper -- excellent in parts (particularly on the data collection and analysis side) and deeply flawed in others.  One of the biggest problems is that it completely ignores one of the greatest duties placed on all researchers -- ie the duty to hear dissenting voices, to acknowledge their existence and expressions in the peer reviewed literature, and to assess what influence they might have on your conclusions.  None of my work in a string of recent papers is cited, although it is 100% relevant to the matter in hand.  There are no citations of Kellaway, Williams-Thorpe, Briggs or Darvill -- which is extraordinary.  

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

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.257471

Over and again, assumptions and speculations are portrayed as established facts.  Some examples.

On the first line of the article the landscapes of Preseli are claimed to have been "connected since the Neolithic".   Have they really?  Not in my book they haven't.......

Then also on page 1:  "up to 80 bluestones were transported from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain."  Speculation, not fact.

P 1:  "Bluestones were erected in the Aubrey Holes and in Bluestonehenge".  Speculation, not fact.

On p 2 there are references to "bluestone quarries", "the transportation of the bluestones" and "the Waun Mawn stone circle."    All speculation.

On p 5:  Reference to "the bluestone sites"........ and on the same page, reference is made to the empty holes used for standing stones at Waun Mawn.  All speculation.

In Table 1 on page 6, Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog are referred to (and elsewhere in the text) as "bluestone quarries."

On p 6 reference is made to a "Middle Neolithic artificial stone platform" -- that's just a figment of somebody's imagination.

On p 16 there is again a reference to "the quarrying of bluestone" -- speculation, not fact.

On p 18 in referring to Waun Mawn the authors talk of the time  "when the stones were first erected at the site."  This is just a dodgy assumption.

On p 20, the authors talk of  "the movement of c 80 bluestones from Preseli c 3000 BC."  It didn't happen, as MPP has himself conceded.

Then the conclusion:  "The pollen data does not support the abandonment of this area when the bluestones were taken to Stonehenge."  For the umpteenth time, they were NOT taken by human beings to Stonehenge.

And so we could go on.  I can excuse the authors for some of this bias, some of the time, since they were at least testing a hypothesis that needed to be stated -- but they have strayed far beyond the hypothesis and have demonstrated a naive acceptance of many very dodgy components of the narrative developed by Parker Pearson over the years.  Why did they not demonstrate a greater critical faculty?  I think we know the answer to that one.........

The fundamental flaw with this paper is that it insists on examining environmental change in West Wales strictly in the contect of a Stonehenge timeline that is assumed to be "correct" or "relevant."  What we see is a classic case of a "monument obsession"—forcing complex, independent regional data into a famous monument's box just to keep a high-profile theory on life support.  Instead of treating the Preseli landscape as an important cultural landscape in its own right, the authors have treated it as a mere supply yard for the Stonehenge builders.  When their own data proves that the local population stayed put and kept farming right through the "Stonehenge migration" window, they still choose to interpret the local story as a minor chapter in the Stonehenge narrative.    This type of framing creates a distorted view of prehistory by implying that nothing of importance happened in Neolithic Wales unless it was dictated by events in Wiltshire.

For 1782, read 3,000 BP

TO SUMMARISE:  Palynological data from the Preseli Hills reveals a narrative of local agricultural continuity, with continuous cereal cultivation and a lack of large-scale abandonment between 3000–2200 BC, contradicting theories of a mass migration to Stonehenge

The local builders were purely pragmatic. The idea that Preseli was a "sacred landscape" uniquely obsessed with bluestone—to the point where they would pack up their entire society and ship their monuments 240 kilometres away to Wiltshire—is an entirely modern invention.  The new palynological and macrofossil data proves that the people of Preseli probably knew nothing whatsoever about Stonehenge.  If there had been a monumental, multi-generational project to dismantle local stone circles, construct massive transport infrastructures, and conduct a mass migration to Salisbury Plain around 3000 BC, it would have left a catastrophic scar in the local environmental record.  Instead, the pollen cores show absolute indifference to the Stonehenge timeline. The local farming families simply carried on clearing small patches of woodland, growing their crops, and grazing their livestock according to their own domestic routines.  The records show a gradual, self-contained ecological evolution rather than a abrupt transformation, with major deforestation not appearing until the Late Bronze Age

As argued by Stephen Briggs, the Neolithic tribes of west Wales were opportunists, utilitarians and pragmatists.  They were also quite sophisticated in that they knew a great deal more about cost / benefit analysis than many modern archaeologists!

So congratulations to Daisy Spencer and her colleagues for killing off another piece of the Parker Pearson narrative.  Thankfully, there is now hardly any of it left.

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Eisteddfod y Garreg Las -- the bluestone eisteddfod

 

On 1st August the Welsh National Eisteddfod -- the biggest annual cultural festival in Wales -- comes to Llantwd near Cardigan.  Over the course of a week or so they expect  180,000 visitors onto the site -- competitors, supporters, families and friends, and expats back home for the occasion.  Almost all of the transactions will be through the medium of Welsh, which is as it should be.

Anyway, the theme this year -- as reflected in the title of the eisteddfod -- is bluestone.  This was decided by the organizing committee many moons ago as something giving the community of NE Pembrokeshire its own special character.  Interestingly, this patch of designated territory is not the same as that given the name "Bluestone Country" in the days when I was a committe member of the Preseli Tourist Association........  Never mind.  If the label helps with the marketing of a worthy event, let's just go with the flow.

The two big poetry competitions -- for the bardic chair and the bardic crown -- do not have bluestone themes.  As ever, the themes are rather abstract.  But we can be sure that bluestones will feature heavily in the entries, and it's a fair bet that one or both of the winners will have written about the bluestones and their significance.  And bluestones will feature strongly in the art and craft competitions too.  So there will be bluestone representations on all sides -- and they will be made of wood, metal, wool and any other materials that can be shaped and coloured blue.  Inevitably, many of the representations will be made to look like spotted dolerite.......

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So here is my small contribution for the occasion, designed to educate those who may not have kept up with the literature:

THE BLUESTONES

Brian John

Once upon a time our heroic ancestors quarried 80 large monoliths of special stone from a sacred place in Preseli and transported them to Stonehenge, to be used in one of the megalithic wonders of the world. That's the story that we all know and love. But is it more than just a story? Is it supported by real historical records or by sound scientific evidence?  Sadly, the answer to both questions is "No"........

First, the term "bluestone" -- which has no geological meaning. The term has been used for a century or so to describe an assortment of more than 30 different non-sarsen rock types found at Stonehenge, in standing stones, fallen stones, buried stumps and small fragments in the soil. Most, but not all, of the rock types (including several types of spotted dolerite, volcanic lava and ash) are found in Mynydd Preseli. Most of the bluestones are not even blue. In ancient history there is no evidence at all that any of these rock types were considered special or sacred -- local cromlechs and other stone setting were always made of whatever handy stones happened to be lying around in the vicinity. At Stonehenge the majority of the known 43 bluestone monoliths look like (and probably are) battered and far-travelled glacial erratics.

And was Mynydd Preseli a sacred place, revered by the Stone Age inhabitants of West Wales? Apparently not. The label "land of mystery and enchantment" is a modern invention, by Rev Done Bushell around 1911. He mistakenly believed that the area on the south flank of Preseli had a greater density of sacred structures than any other part of West Wales, and he also referred to the area as "a prehistoric Westminster". Picturesque but unreliable. In the Mabinogion there is no mention of Preseli as being a special or magical place, and in his fantastical writings about King Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth did not differentiate between the sarsens and bluestones at Stonehenge, and suggested that the monument had been magically transported from Ireland, not Wales.

The story of the human transport of the bluestones was invented by geologists Herbert Thomas around 1920, at a time when the nation was recovering from the traumas of the First World War. There was a need for a "feel good" story that emphasised the high civilisation and technical skills of our heroic ancestors, and Thomas obliged, ignoring the opinions of his fellow geologists who believed that the bluestones had been transported by glacier ice. People loved the story, and it was immediately picked up by archaeologists and built into the educational and marketing strategy for Stonehenge.

Then, ironically, the story was weaponised immediately after the Second Worl War during the "Battle of Preseli", when the local community took on the War Office which wanted to enclose the greater part of Mynydd Preseli as a military training and firing range. It was argued -- tactically -- by influential politicians and religious leaders that Preseli was one of the great sacred cradles of Welsh culture, and that it would be not only disrespectful but actually sacriligious to turn the wild moorlands into a place devoted to warfare. The Stonehenge bluestone link was incorporated into the argument. As explained by historian Hefin Wyn, the government backed off, and the battle was won.  In retrospect, the designation of Preseli as a historic mystical and holy place was nonsense, but all is fair in love and war!

In 1952 the uplands were designated as part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and saved for the nation and for future generations. Mynydd Preseli is still a wild and wonderful place loved by many thousands of people for its wide horizons and quiet beauty.  In that sense, as demonstrated by Waldo Williams in his poem "Preseli", this is truly a special place. The bluestones, in their infinite variety, are still there, exposed in rocky tors like Carn Meini and Carn Alw.

But let's not fool ourselves. The elaborate and fanciful narrative developed by archaeologists and geologists in recent years does not have its roots in prehistory; it is a modern myth, created only about a hundred years ago, unsupported by modern science, and now promoted largely for commercial reasons.


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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.