Standing Stone Sunday! Oh happy day. Social media are filled with pictures of wonderful standing stones. This is one of the Cilgwyn standing stones (there are a few others scattered about). I would estimate from its picturesque encrustations of lichen and moss that it has been there since the Neolithic -- a sign of a highly advanced civilisation with an unrivalled knowledge of megalith building. (Psst -- don't tell anybody, but I put it there in 1980, for the convenience of the sheep and the goats....)
PS. There is another beautiful standing stone up the road, in the field adjacent to Bluestone Brewery, but up by Simon, Mark, Dave and assorted other nutters a couple of years ago -- with the aid of a JCB. Very nice it is too -- much more impressive than mine.
Wasn't a JCB driven by archaeologist Josh Pollard somehow involved at Rhosyfelin?.....then, with the eye of faith, and nowt much else, an entire myth was concocted.....
ReplyDeleteThe noun "perpetrators" somehow springs to mind. Magical mystery tourists soon arrived.
Yes, they did use some heavy machinery down there -- driven by professionals, as I understand. But they sure did shift a vast amount of sediment which they found uninteresting -- including glacial and fluvioglacial and colluvial sediments which would have told us a lot about the physical processes operating in the area. Hundreds of tonnes were moved, and I found all sorts of glacial erratics and more local stones just chucked onto the huge spoil heap that they built -- with no record kept of context. They clearly had nobody on site who had any interest in glacial geomorphology or sedimentology. It was a scandal. They were just looking for a quarrying floor -- which of course they never found.
ReplyDeleteRhosyfelin quarry [ indexed as part of " Preseli" in MPP's Stonehenge...Greatest... Mystery book of 2012]. Page 286, chapter 17. After his " Pompeii" under - statement, he writes..... " If that wasn't enough, Josh' s EXPERT use of the mini - digger unearthed a long slab of rhyolite lying on the quarry floor.....Someone had left behind a monolith......This was the smoking gun... "...etc etc.
ReplyDeleteAll perfectly reasonable if you don't consult any glacial geomorphologists whatsoever. A classic case of confirmation bias, I think that's the expression?
All that purple prose preceded the discovery that there were organic materials under the stone that were dated to the Bronze Age -- so the stone could not possibly have been intended as a Neolithic standing stone, let alone a stone designated for a trip to Stonehenge. The latest revision is of course that maybe no stones intended for there -- or anywhere else -- were ever quarried from Rhosyfelin, in spite of bits and pieces of rock found in crevices being labelled as "quarrying wedges." The whole narrative is nonsensical, and always was.
ReplyDeleteWill MPP ever admit that he was wrong about anything, and that his fantasies about Rhosyfelin were disputed as far back as 2015? No way -- his standard technique is simply to make his narrative more and more complicated, in order to build into it all these inconvenient bits and pieces of evidence.
How not to do research.