The Bluestone Transport Myth -- how it all began

Yesterday I gave a talk in Cardigan (about my novels, not about Stonehenge) and a gentleman came up to me and gave me a copy of a translation from an article written (in Welsh) by Prof OT Jones in 1966.  He thought I might be interested in it -- too right!!  I had never seen it before, and indeed I had no idea that the article existed.

The article is reproduced above -- click to enlarge.

Jones was one of the team which was doing the original geological survey of Pembrokeshire in the years before the First World War, and in this article he describes a trip by Thomas, Cantrill, Dixon, Jones and Evans to the Preseli Hills in 1908.  The geologists were involved in an erratic hunt, trying to track down the source of the spotted dolerites which they had found scattered across the countryside in SE Pembs and Carmarthenshire.  The found the source area around Carn Meini, and Jones describes "thousands of blocks lying loose on the ground and extending along the hilltops towards the road to Maenclochog."  Note this statement:  "..... there was no argument that it was from this spot (Carn Meini) that the stone had been carried by ice towards the southern part of the county."  Note too that this was strictly a geological expedition -- there is no mention anywhere of archaeology or indeed of any use of the stones in prehistoric structures.

Jones describes how HHT later received a "parcel... containing a large number of specimens" of rock with a request that the source area might be found.  These specimens had been collected at Stonehenge -- and neither HHT nor OTJ was in any doubt that they matched the spotted dolerites they had seen at Carn Meini some years earlier.  Thomas visited Stonehenge and looked at the bluestone monoliths,  and although he was convinced that the majority had come from Carn Meini he spent 3 years checking to see if there might be other source areas in Ireland, Wales, England or Brittany.  He didn't find any, but he did satisfy himself that the rhyolites at Stonehenge had come from Carn Alw -- and that association of the two rock types both at Stonehenge and on the Preseli Hills convinced him of the "match" between source area and final resting place.  "This settled the matter absolutely" wrote Jones -- of course, as we now know, it did nothing of the sort, but this was after all a long time ago.  He was also convinced by HHT's identification of the Altar Stone as coming from the Cosheston Sandstone beds on the shores of the Daugleddau (the inner reaches of Milford Haven.)

What interests me about this historic document is that HHT and OTJ and the other geologists at the time saw no archaeological significance in any of the work they were doing -- and that there was no question in their minds but that large numbers of spotted dolerite boulders and slabs had been picked up by glacier ice and carried southwards and eastwards.  We still don't know why, or when, HHT moved from that relatively simple position to propose that the stones "could not possibly" have been moved by ice over a distance of 200 km or so, from their source area to Salisbury Plain...............