Burl on Boles Barrow

See also this, among other posts on the Boles Barrow bluestone:
 http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/bluestone-boulder-or-two-or-ten.html

Following some recent correspondence on this blog about Boles Barrow (again), I have taken another look at Aubrey Burl's writings on the subject.  The barrow (otherwise known as Heytesbury 1) is generally classified as an earthen Neolithic long barrow, dated to approx 6,000 - 5,000 years BP.  Burl is convinced that the big stones in this long barrow were sealed in place about a thousand years before the Steonehenge Q and R holes were dug and stones placed into them.

Burl knows his subject well, and has researched it carefully -- and in several of his books he describes the discovery by William Cunnington in 1801 of a lump of "bluestone of the kind later to be set up in concentric circles at Stonehenge."  Burl says it was one of a number of loose stones so loosely stacked that they cane tumbling down as the excavation was under way.  Above these stones was a capping of white marl -- which presumably means chalk detritus.  Most of the big stones were sarsens, up to 200 lb in weight.

Cunnington lived just 3 miles from Boles Barrow, in the village of Heytesbury.  He was a good enough geologist to know the difference between sarsen and spotted dolerite.  He was so taken with these stones that he took ten of them and arranged them in a circle around a tree in his lawn. Later on (some time before 1860) the stone was removed from Cunnington's garden to the grounds of Heytesbury House, where it was known as the "Stonehenge Stone"  -- not because it had come from Stonehenge but because it was clearly like the best-known of the bluestones there.  Later on, in 1934, it was given by Siegfried Sassoon to the Salisbury Museum, where it remains to this day.  Its dimensions were (and presumably still are) 76 cm x 67 cm x 41 cm.  It was weighed and found to weigh over 12 cwt -- just about manageable by three men working together.  So it was a big heavy boulder -- not a pillar like the most famous of the Stonehenge bluestones.

This stone has for a very long time been extremely inconvenient to those who subscribe to the "human bluestone transport theory"  because it suggests that at least one big chunk of bluestone was present on Salisbury Plain a thousand years too early.  Accordingly, many writers -- including James Scourse and Chris Green -- have gone out of their way to question the provenance of the stone and to suggest that it was really taken from Stonehenge either by Cunnington or somebody else, and mistakenly identified as the stone from Boles Barrow.  They have no hard evidence to support this contention -- the best they can say is that the provenance is inadequately established.  That is a pretty feeble line to take, and Burl gives it short shrift.  Did Scourse and Green expect that the stones in Cunnington's garden should have written provenances, or bronze plaques with "certified places of origin" affixed to them" ?  Burl argues that Cunnington was a fastidious recorder and that there is no reason why he or anybody else would get their stones and their provenances mixed up.  In any case, he says, the careful survey of the Stonehenge stones and stumps by Flinders Petrie in 1877 established that no bluestones had been stolen or removed from the site between 1747 (the date of John Wood's plan) and 1877.  He also suggests that if Cunnington was indeed into the business of boulder collecting, he was much more likely to collect stones from a ruinous and collapsed long barrow close to his home than from Stonehenge, which was deemed -- even in 1801 -- to be a very valuable archaeological site.

That's all good enough for me.  Burl is dismissive of the human transport fantasy, saying in his book called "A Brief History of Stonehenge" (2007):  "There was no human transportation.  It is a geological certainty that agrees with several quite independent facts."

In accepting that the Stonehenge bluestones were from an assemblage of glacial erratics, Burl has not made any firm pronouncement (as far as I know) on where this assemblage was located.  He suggests a site somewhere in West Wiltshire -- and inclines to the view that the stones were somewhere near Heytesbury and Boles Barrow, about 12 miles from Stonehenge, available on the ground surface and ready to be picked up.   He mentions a place named Breakheart Bottom.  Appropriate name, that......