The Stonehenge bluestone dump -- a reconstruction

 I'm sometimes asked what the bluestone assemblage at Stonehenge might have looked like when the stones were discovered and used by the builders of the ruinous old monument.  Well, I think it might have looked something like this -- a pile of spotted dolerite boulders in the landscape near Glan yr Afon on the north flank of Mynydd Preseli.

These boulders have not been here for all that long -- maybe 24,000 years or so, since the end of the last glacial episode.  Any boulders left behind by the ice in the Stonehenge landscape would have been exposed to the atmosphere for very much longer -- maybe 450,000 years -- or if my "reassignment of glaciations" is valid, around 650,000 years.  That period of time must have spanned both interglacials and long periods of periglacial climate as the glaciers expanded and contracted further north.  For long periods of time, surface boulders might well have been overshadowed by vegetation, and for many thousands of years they will have been intermittently covered by snowfields.  But there will nionetheless have been many thousands of years of cosmic bombardment.

The only way we are going to approach the truth on this matter is by getting cosmogenic dating on the surfaces of some of the Stonehenge bluestones. If they were quarried, as the archaeologists like to think, there will be surface exposure ages of c 5,500 years or less.  If they are genuine glacial erratics, the ages will be so great that they will be almost off the scale.......... 

One day, when EH starts to cooperate in some proper science, truth will out........

I would love to see a proper dating programme, with samples taken from the Stonehenge bluestone boulders, from Pembrokeshire tors, from Pembrokeshire erratic boulders, and from the so-called quarry faces at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog..........

Pic: courtesy Simon Banton