The bluestone boulder -- or two? Or ten?

 Photo:  thanks to Pete G.  Is this really the one?  And does it really weigh more than 1,000 lb?

Further to our recent discussion about the Boles Barrow bluestone, its provenance and its dimensions,  I have various older posts on this.  Just type in "Boles Barrow" into the search box.  One entry is here:

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2011/03/boles-barrow-bluestone.htmlPrevious post

There is an interesting discussion on our friend Hobgoblin's blog.  This is the final piece of his text:

From Hobgoblin's blog:

http://thehobgoblin.blogspot.com/2011/04/boles-barrow-bluestone.html

One Stone or Two?

It's all very confusing. Of course the bluestone taken to the museum from the garden of Heytesbury House need not be the Boles Barrow bluestone; as a collector of finds from his barrow diggings, Cunnington very likely had many other artefacts at his residence. However, from the information we have available is it possible to say which stone is which, or indeed was found in the garden of Heytesbury House by Ben Cunnington in 1923?

Cunnington first recorded that he removed ten stones from Boles Barrow that he described as the same as the sarsens, the 'upright large stones'. He then added a note to one of his letters that he had found a bluestone amongst them. Cunnington was an able geologist for his day and should have been quite capable of identifying between sarsen and bluestone.Yet this does not satisfy the question why only one stone from the ten found in Boles Barrow, local or exotic, was taken from Cunnington's garden to Heytesbury House and the question of where are the remainder.

Furthermore, this still does not explain the huge difference in weights, more than 1,000lbs, between the Boles Barrow stones (28 – 200lbs) and the specimen in the Salisbury Museum (1,338lbs). Taken solely on the evidence of the weights of the stones we can conclude with a reasonable degree of confidence that the bluestone on display in Salisbury Museum cannot therefore be the stone from Boles Barrow.
 
And yet the bluestone from the garden of Heytesbury House known to the occupiers as the “Stonehenge stone” sounds suspiciously as exactly that – a stone removed from the stone circle on Salisbury Plain. In a letter of 1933, R S Newall, assistant to  William Hawley in his excavations of Stonehenge between 1919-1926 and discoverer of the Aubrey Holes, stated he found a large piece of spotted dolerite in a cottage garden near Lake House. Newall described it as a rough cube of about 18 inches each way, which might have been broken off the top of a worked monolith of the bluestone horseshoe. The owner of Lake House, near Wilsford, south of Stonehenge, donated the bluestone to the Salisbury Museum. [25]

Are there two bluestones in Salisbury Museum; one from the garden of Heytesbury House and the other from Lake House, both sounding suspiciously like a stone robbed from Stonehenge? There is only one on display claiming to be the Boles Barrow Bluestone. Is there another hidden in the vaults? Although Newall does not specify when the Lake House bluestone was taken to the Museum it must have been before he wrote in 1933. Therefore, it cannot be the same stone as the bluestone from Heytesbury Garden donated to the Museum in 1934.

The so-called Boles Barrow Bluestone in Salisbury Museum is the only foreign rock from south west Wales found in Wiltshire not at Stonehenge that can be considered more than a fragment. Yet the archaeological context of the specimen in the Salisbury Museum is uncertain and cannot be considered secure evidence in any argument.

The Boles Barrow Bluestone remains elusive.