Two nice photos from our walk down on the Parrog in Newport, the other day. These are two big erratic boulders on the shore platform, just a few yards from the coastal footpath. They are both dolerite boulders. One of them is clearly a glacial erratic, resting on the black mudstone shore platform and probably very close to where it was originally dropped by the ice. The other one has clearly been bashed about a bit, with chunks knocked off it, I suspect by the men who were building the coast defences and placing big boulders along the base of the Parrog sea wall.
The bulk of the bluestones at Stonehenge look like the big boulder in the top photo. If they had been quarried, as Ixer, Bevins and Parker Pearson would like us to believe, they would have looked more like the boulder in the bottom photo. This little matter of stone shape and surface characteristics is something tht the MPP team mambers consistently and quite deliberately ignore. That struck me again the other day when I looked again at the famous "Lost Circle" BBC film, in which MPP pretends that the people who supposedly quarried the Waun Mawn and Stonehenge monoliths were looking for gorgeous pillars. Well, if Stonehenge is anything to go by, and if we follow the logic of the archaeologists that the bluestones were carefully selected at their places of origin, we have to conclude that the megalith hunters had a strong preference for small, weathered, rounded glacial erratics.
1 comment:
Expect I've walked past them thar erratic boulders on occasions a few years back whilst visiting my brother (who lives quite near the Carreg Samson cromlech near Trefin).
Yes, MPP and his pet twin geologists just seem to have FAILED to properly perceive the shapes of ALL FORTY - THREE remaining " bluestones " at Stonehenge! And I've even heard MPP utter the word "geomorphology" whilst speaking to visitors to one of his Stonehenge excavations. Very remiss.....
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