My conclusions.......

Almost 3 years have elapsed since I was hard at work on the text for The Bluestone Enigma. So what has changed during that time? Not a lot, to be honest, except that more evidence has stacked up in support of what I suggested. I have added some notes below, in red.

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These were my conclusions in The Bluestone Enigma, published in 2008:

** The bluestones have come from at least fifteen different localities in West and South Wales, and other areas as yet unidentified. It is inconceivable that a series of Neolithic "stone collecting expeditions" can have collected all these stones, of many shapes and sizes, from so many different (and geologically unrelated) locations.

Having gone through the literature, ancient and modern, I am now quite sure that the foreign material at Stonehenge has come from at least 30 different locations, including Pont Saeson and other locations within the outcrop area of the Fishguard Volcanics in North Pembs.

** There is no evidence for any cultural, political or economic motive which would have driven Early Neolithic man to undertake any “bluestone collecting expeditions” in the far west of Wales.

This is still true.

** No cultural links have ever been established between West Wales and Wessex that might demonstrate any affinity or preferred trading contact between the two areas. Their tombs, stone settings and tools show that Pembrokeshire had strong links with tribes around the Irish Sea and St George’s Channel, but not with tribes in England.

This is still true.

** It has never been demonstrated that the Neolithic tribes had the technical ability or the mental maps which would have enabled them to undertake the proposed stone collection enterprise.

Still no evidence to contradict my statement on this.

** The bluestones were present on or near Salisbury Plain at least a thousand years before the first stone monument was built at Stonehenge.

People still go on about the provenance of the Boles Barrow bluestone, but I see no reason to doubt its authenticity.

** Some of the bluestones at Stonehenge (for example, those made of volcanic ash) are "rubbish stones" which would never have been selected for incorporation into a megalithic monument. They were used simply because they were conveniently located close to the building site.

The new geology on the rhyolite orthostats and debris (by Rob Ixer, Richard Bevins and colleagues) confirms this, although they do not address this issue directly.

** There is no evidence that the "spotted dolerite" so beloved of archaeologists was ever viewed as sacred or magical. It was never used preferentially, either in Wales or Wiltshire, in megalithic structures.

I have confirmed this by further research in the literature -- the spotted dolerite was NOT a special stone.

** It follows that if spotted dolerite was not viewed as a healing or magical rock, the idea of healing springs associated with spotted dolerite outcrops is equally fanciful.

I still think this -- although certain senior professors keep on claiming (on the basis of NO hard evidence) that there were assumed healing properties.

** The idea that the bluestones at Stonehenge were carried to the site as “petrified embodiments” of the ancestors of Neolithic people is also fanciful, and smacks of attempting to justify an unproven assumption.

This might be a fine theory in Madagascar, but there is nothing to support it in the UK.

** Studies of axe-heads made of spotted dolerite and found in England suggest that they were actually made from the same group of stones that were built into the monument. In other words, Stonehenge was probably at one time the site of an axe-head factory.

This idea might need some revising, when we know more about the distribution of rock types through the Stonehenge layer and in other detritus.

** None of the stone settings at Stonehenge was ever finished. Whatever might have been the grand designs of the "architects", the builders never had enough stones to finish the job.


Nobody has come up with any evidence to contradict this. And my YouTube Video called "Stonehenge Unhinged" is thus far unchallenged except by those who are outraged by the very thought of such sacrilege!

** The ice of the great Irish Sea Glacier came in from the west and reached at least as far east as Bath, the Mendip Hills and Glastonbury. It is still uncertain whether the ice covered Salisbury Plain.

These statements still stand -- but I am tending towards the idea that the ice edge may have been somewhere near the chalk scarp.

** An "erratic train" of stones of all shapes and sizes was left in the landscape to the west of Stonehenge. It was an easy matter for the Stonehenge builders to follow this trail westwards, and to collect up one stone after another, until they were all gone.

This idea, which I developed in the EARTH article with Lionel Jackson, is still a good working hypothesis.

** It follows that the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge had no idea where the stones had come from. They had no need to know. They may have revered them because they were “different” from the sarsens, but not because of any association with a “sacred place.”

This is still perfectly reasonable, and I still believe this.

** The larger erratics were used as monoliths in stone settings while smaller stones were used as packing stones, mauls and hammers, and for the manufacture of hand axes. The evidence of glaciation on Salisbury Plain is not missing or destroyed; it has simply been moved from one place to another through a stupendous human effort.

Nobody has seriously disputed this.

** This is all entirely consistent with what we know of Neolithic monuments, whose locations were always determined by the availability of nearby raw materials. So far from Stonehenge being “the grand exception to the rule”, it conformed to the rule in all important respects.

This still stands, and is backed up in the literature.

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And from the point of view of the glaciology and geomorphology, recent literature has confirmed that in the earlier glacial episodes (if not in the Devensian) the Irish Sea Glacier (or ice stream) behaved more or less as described, sweeping across Pembrokeshire and the Presely Hills, moving eastwards up the Bristol Channel, and pushing inland into Somerset and Avon. Nobody -- not even James Scourse or David Bowen) has suggested otherwise. This MUST have happened if we are to explain the existence of glacial deposits in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. The BRITICE models support the idea of a very extensive glaciation at this time, including small ice caps over the uplands of SW England. And my investigations of isostatic / eustatic interactions lead inexorably to the conclusion that the giant erratics of the Channel coasts can only be explained by a BIG glaciation which included isostatic depression of the crust in Southern England......

The more we know about the sources of the rhyolites and dolerites which have ended up at Stonehenge, the more confirmation there is for the entrainment of glacial erratics by ice moving upslope on the northern flank of Presely, in a "contact zone" between Welsh ice and Irish Sea ice. The band was a remarkably narrow one -- and explains the petrology of the Stonehenge bluestone orthostats quite neatly. Nobody has thus far come up with anything from glaciology to contradict my conclusions on bluestone entrainment, transport and deposition. It all fits.