Can a cunning plan be scheduled as an ancient monument?

The Dronescaping Britain reconstruction, showing what a Waun Mawn "lost circle" might 

have looked like, if it ever did exist...

If you are a famous archaeologist who has appeared on the telly with Alice Roberts, and if you convince yourself that 5,000 years ago some chaps in West Wales had a cunning plan to build a lost circle of bluestones out on a wild piece of moorland, but never quite got round to it, can you then apply to the authorities for the whole extent of the imaginary stone circle to be protected as a scheduled Ancient Monument?  That, strange as it may seem, is apparently what MPP has done,  in spite of the fact that some weeks ago he admitted (in his 2021 field report) that after 3 field seasons he and his team had failed to establish that there ever was a partial stone circle at Waun Mawn, let alone a completed one with 50 or more standing stones.  Welcome to the mad-house..........

I do wonder sometimes what all of MPP's co-authors (Joshua Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, Chris Tilley, Rob Ixer, Richard Bevins, Dave Shaw, Jim Rylatt, Ellen Simmons, Duncan Schlee, Adam Stanford, Kate Welham and many others) think about this sort of thing?  Theirs are the names that are used as co-authors on one paper after another, so they have to share corporate responsibility for what appears in print.  But do they also share responsibility for the promotional and media activities of the boss?  Were they consulted before a request went in for the scheduling of Waun Mawn not just as a "stone group" but as a full stone circle?  I also suspect that a request also went in some years ago for the scheduling of Craig Rhosyfelin as an Ancient Monument, to be listed as the site of a Neolithic / Bronze Age bluestone quarry.  There was no solid evidence to support the claims of the diggers there either -- but does anybody actually notice that, or care?  (Actually, some people do care, by the look of it, since Rhosyfelin has NOT actually been scheduled -- although it is now given some protection as a RIGS site.)  I wonder if another request has gone in with respect to Carn Goedog, another imaginary quarrying site?

This all comes into sharp focus because it is clear that the project leaders of the Stones of Stonehenge team at UCL are determined to push the postulated Stonehenge / Waun Mawn connection to its limits, and far beyond.  This is in spite of the hugely disappointing (for them) results of the 2017, 2018 and 2021 Waun Mawn digs, and in spite of the fact that not a shred of evidence has been found to link Waun Mawn and that old ruin on Salisbury Plain.  In the BM exhibition about Stonehenge, due to open with great fanfares quite soon, MPP is pushing the line that the Stonehenge bluestones were parked up at Waun Mawn for several centuries, while in the process "acquiring holiness", before being shipped off with due reverence to Stonehenge.

It appears that in this post-processual world, all you have to do as an archaeologist is to dig some holes in the ground, employ some nice scientific techniques,  and then sit quietly and see inside the minds of the people whose creations you are looking at, or not, as the case may be.  Then you tell the world what those good people, all those years ago, believed in and planned to do, even if they never actually got round to doing it.  Motivation and good intentions, camaraderie and loyalty, are in the end the only things that matter. Who needs facts anyway?  Bingo! 

As I said, welcome to the mad-house. 

PS.  Thanks to Dave for pointing out that Waun Mawn was scheduled in 1950 as a "stone group" with the comment "interpretation as a circle seems particularly doubtful."  It's a bit vague as to the size of the protected area, but it's apparent that if Cadw and the other authorities accept the speculation about a vast "lost stone circle" the size of the "scheduled area" would be greatly increased.  The matter is currently under review.