Glacial Erratics and Flights of Fancy

 Some of the erratics in Flimston Churchyard, all from NW Pembs and some incorporated here into headstones for graves.  Some were brought from sites c 3 km away.  Does anybody care EXACTLY where they came from?  No -- we are all very happy as it is.

I have been quite entertained by the attempt, by fellow blogger Tim Daw, to deny the significance of the "Newall Boulder" on the grounds that we do not know EXACTLY where it came from.  It was found by Hawley and his fellow diggers in their 1924 dig in a "secondary" position, having been worked and then thrown away by one of our mysterious ancestors.  Kellaway thought it was of great importance as a "proof of glaciation" at Stonehenge, but Tim is having none of it.   "If it has been moved by humans, and there are no records where from, then it adds nothing to the argument." says Tim, rather grandly.  " If you don't know where the glacier left it, it don't mean a thing."

Well, I have been studying glacial erratics for most of my life, and I think I can claim to know a thing or two about them.  Let me assure Tim that the Newall Boulder does add a great deal to the argument, and confirms what some of us have been saying for years about the likelihood of glacial action in the Stonehenge landscape.  For a start, it's not unique -- there are glacial erratics all over the place, particularly in the bluestone circle.  And in heavily populated countries like the UK glacial erratics are very seldom found in EXACTLY the places where they were dumped by ice.  If you find an erratic boulder in till it is probably still in the place where it was dumped by the ice, but most of the "free erratics" have been moved from fields into field boundaries or into stone clearance cairns, or gathered up for use in stone walls or built into dwellings and farm buildings.  Dare I say it, many thousands of them have been incorporated into Neolithic megalithic monuments, as pointed out by Stephen Briggs, Geoffrey Kellaway and then Olwen Williams-Thorpe and her co-workers many years ago.  The fact that these erratics have been collected and moved about does nothing to diminish their significance.  They help to present a coherent picture of where the ice came from, what the directions of movement were, and where the ice edge melted away.  A great part of the map of ice movements across the British Isles is based upon the evidence provided by erratics that are no longer EXACTLY where they were found.......

So the story of that lump of rock being shifted about the place in the Netherlands is a jolly little tale, of no significance whatsoever to the argument about Newall's Boulder.

I'll quote Kellaway again: "When found, the weathered boulder had been thrown away with chippings and other waste material. An attempt had been made to dress one end of the boulder but this, in Mr Newall’s opinion, had failed because of the sheared condition of the rock. It would appear that this small boulder, already deeply weathered, would never have been of any practical value. To suggest it had been carried from North Wales lo Wiltshire only to be tested and thrown away as worthless would imply an astounding lack of common sense and understanding of the properties of rocks on the part of the men who built Stonehenge. If, however, the bluestones were recovered locally from material scattered on the surface of the Chalk or were present in solution cavities, then the presence of inferior material is comprehensible. Having gathered up all the available bluestones, both from natural sources and from abandoned Neolithic structures, the Bronze Age builders of Stonehenge used the large ones for constructional purposes and tested the smaller boulders for the manufacture of implements. Those which were unsuitable were thrown away."

One further point.  It's a bit rich for people like Tim to argue that they must have absolute proof of the EXACT place where the Newall Boulder was emplaced, while accepting the fantasies about bluestone quarries at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog and a "lost stone circle" at Waun Mawn.  There is no hard proof from any of those sites of any Stonehenge-related Neolithic activity, just as there is no hard proof that any of the Stonehenge bluestones have been provenanced to "within a few square metres."  (The approximate provenancing -- to within a few sq km -- is good and should be applauded.  But EXACT provenancing?  Sorry, but that's just in the minds of the deluded.)

What's good for the goose should be good for the gander.