THE BOOK
Some of the ideas discussed in this blog are published in my new book called "The Stonehenge Bluestones" -- available by post and through good bookshops everywhere. Bad bookshops might not have it....
To order, click
HERE

Saturday 8 April 2023

A giant erratic in Massachusetts

 




Thanks to our friends Eleanor and Anthony Lord for these photos of a giant erratic in the Harold Parker State Forest, near Andover, Massachusetts, USA.

Not sure what the rock is, but it looks igneous.  The erratic is quite literally falling to pieces -- as crossing joints or fractures open up probably as a result of frost-related processes every winter.

3 comments:

Tony Hinchliffe said...

What a pity it's in Andover, Massachusetts, and not Andover, Hampshire just down the road from Amesbury and you - know - where......

Steve Hooker said...

Been thinking, lately, how many of Stonehenge's bluestones are chips off the same block. If there was an erratic, much like this, which split into many blocks, later to be carved into pillars. I'll bet that so many of the remaining bluestone pillars are brothers and sisters.

I wonder what a very large erratic off of one of the Preseli Tors would look like—to Mesolithic peoples. Rather, what a whopper, like in this picture, would mean to them, stuck, in the Salisbury Plain. What stories would develop around it? For it then, maybe 1,000s of years later, to be dragged away, in bits, to be erected in a circular ditch. And if those old stories would still be attached to the parts.

Stories last hundreds, thousands of years. Near me, there is the story of the Tittersone Clee giants and the shaft of an arrow—an eight foot slab of stone. Erratics call out for story explanations : -)

BRIAN JOHN said...

Well, I wouldn't like to speculate as to a giant erratic like this being dumped on Salisbury Plain. But I agree with Olwen Williams-Thorpe and her colleagues that the only quarry associated with Stonehenge was Stonehenge itself -- used as an axe factory and as a source for smaller lumps of stone . The sheer variety of rock types points to multiple sources, not one or two gigantic ones...... and of course the great majority of the bluestones at Stonehenge are unmodified glacial erratics, heavily abraded and weathered.