The lost boulder and the mice in the attic.......

 

It's a pretty extraordinary story and many might be inclined not to believe it......... but it is all rather entertaining......

In 1924 William Hawley and his diggers found a small boulder in his Stonehenge dig (and three others as well) in a layer of "rubbish" and chalk rubble 64 cm beneath the present ground surface.  It was clearly not a "knock-off" from one of the bluestone monoliths, and was made of a rock type that nobody recognized. Some bits of it had been knocked off by a Stonehenge axe-maker, but he (presumably it was a "he") had given up in disgust when, having picked it up somewhere nearby,  he discovered that the stone did not fracture conchoidally.  He had thrown it away onto a pile of accumulating chalk rubble around the time that the monoliths were being erected.  There it had remained for 5,000 years or so.

Because it was not classifiable as an authentic implement, or even a crude "rough out", Hawley wanted to throw it away again -- but one of his colleagues, Robert Newall, suspected that it might be important, and because there was a shortage of storage space at Stonehenge he took it to his home in Lower Woodford and stored it in his attic, together with lots of other samples.  There it remained for 46 years......

Around 1970 geologist Geoffrey Kallaway found a reference to the boulder in Hawley's report on the 1924 dig, and asked Newall if he knew of its whereabouts.  Newall confirmed that he had it, and passed it over (with 15 other erratic fragments) for detailed geological examination by Kellaway and his colleagues in the IGS.  They took various samples, knocked a few more bits off the boulder, and discussed at length what its significance might be.  But no major publication followed, and although Kellaway thought the boulder might be a glacial erratic (because it was striated) the consensus was that glacier ice could not possibly have reached Stonehenge, and the boulder was handed back to Newall.   It went back into the attic.

But Newall was feeling his age,  and decided to clear his attic.  He passed over the boulder and many of his other Stonehenge samples to Salisbury Museum in 1976.  As they tried to sort out the material there was an entertaining exchange of letters between Capt Banks and staff and Mr Newall, who had to admit that many of his notes relating to the samples had been eaten by mice!  The larger fragments of rock had no identification labels at all.    So when the material was finally added to the museum collection there was some confusion over what was what.  Luckily the "Newall Boulder" (RSN-18) was distinctive enough not to get confused with anything else, and it was given the acquisition number 1978.16.  Newall died in the same year.  Then the boulder was put into a cupboard and forgotten about once again.........

All the correspondence held in the Kellaway Archive in the University of Bath, and two IGS photographs, confirm the provenence of the erratic ignimbrite boulder.  Thanks to the help of Lizzie Richmond, I have copies of all the IGS and other letters and documents on the file.

It's interesting that among the professional geologists there seems to have been a consensus that the boulder had come not from North Pembrokeshire but from Snowdonia -- most likely the Capel Curig area.

So since its discovery almost a century ago, this boulder has been stored away, out of sight and out of mind, for more than 90 years.  All the attention, over the years, has been lavished on the "Boles Barrow Bluestone", whose provenance and post-discovery history is a matter of vast disagreement -- but this little boulder could turn out to be MUCH more important.