Another day, another myth: the Cerrigmarchogion "quarry"

In their weirdly naive podcast about Waun Mawn, the Prehistory Guys -- who have quite a following -- accept so much of the nonsense about the "lost circle" and about the supposed bluestone quarries that one doesn't really know where to start.  That's the trouble, when people undertake an "expert analysis" of places they have never visited and of published articles that are taken at face value because they have no interest in hearing dissenting voices.

For 40 minutes or so I found myself listening in horror to some of the things that Rupert Soskin and Michael Bott accepted as fact, without any critical analysis whatsoever.  Listen to it if you dare!  It's all on Podcast 41: Waun Mawn and Stonehenge  (c 47 mins)

https://theprehistoryguys.uk

Just one example.  They mention on a number of occasions the "Cerrigmarchogion bluestone quarry" as the place from which unspotted dolerite monoliths were taken to be placed in the hypothetical Waun Mawn standing stone circle.  So where on earth did they get that idea from?  Well, if we trace it back we can see that MPP and his fellow authors have speculated on a number of occasions about the origin of one flake of unspotted dolerite found in one of the supposed stone sockets at Waun Mawn.  Choosing to ignore the presence of unspotted dolerite in the immediate neighbourhood (the use of local stones in standing stone settings does not figure in their narrative) they speculated that it might have come from Cerrigmarchogion, on the Preseli ridge about 3 km away.  Why there?  Well, it appears that Richard Bevins suggested that location rather than a host of other more local provenances -- but whether that suggestion was based on a lab analysis of the Waun Mawn sample is unclear.  I suspect he just looked at the flake and thought Cerrigmarchogion might be a nice place for it to have come from......   If there is any hard scientific basis for the suggested provenancing, it would have been presented to us in print by now.

Cerrigmarchogion has featured in geological investigations for 100 years or more, including those of HH Thomas in 1923 and the big OU team led by Richard Thorpe and others in 1991.  It was thought of as a possible source of SPOTTED dolerite bluestones at Stonehenge, and there is some confusion because Ixer and Bevins refer to the site as a possible source of UNSPOTTED dolerites. The truth of the matter is that the Cerrigmarchogion outcrops are quite extensive; some of the dolerites are spotted, some are unspotted, and some are slightly spotted. Is that clear?

Bevins, Pearce and Ixer now think that one of the Stonehenge monoliths (SH45) has probably came from Cerrigmarchogion (or Talfynydd)-- so that is where the idea of the quarry has probably come from........

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2021/06/more-on-stonehenge-dolerites-multiple.html

I don't have a problem with Cerrigmarchogion or any of the other Presely tors being a source of Stonehenge bluestones or being an entrainment location for overriding ice -- but if our friends Soskin and Bott had done the simplest of investigations they would have noted that that there is nowhere in Preseli that looks less like a quarrying site.  It's not often visited, except by people plodding along the "Golden Road' or ridgeway track, but that's no excuse.  There are maps and photographs.  It's an open expanse of moorland (dry heath of heather and grasses interspersed with boggy and peaty areas) and with many small tors or rocky outcrops over a wide area which are, in local legend, the petrified remains of the knights of King Arthur who fell in battle with the monstrous boar called Twrch Trwyth and his cohorts:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2016/08/cerrig-marchogion-and-giant-boar.html

I'm not against quarries in principle.  Indeed, there is a very nice Bronze Age one on Foeldrygarn.  But it would be reassuring if people like the Prehistory Guys could come up with a bit of evidence instead of simply referring to a remote location as a Neolithic quarrying site simply on the basis of a throwaway remark from an imaginative archaeologist.