Carningli summit

 

This is another great image from the Preseli360 drone camera, showing just how rugged the summit is when seen from the S or SW.  Jagged rock faces and scree slopes are normally associated with shaded of lee side slopes facing N or NE, but here they face south and south-east.  I have pondered long and hard on the explanation for this -- and am convinced that the NW flank of the mountain was "cleaned up" by the overriding ice of the Irish Sea Ice Stream coming in from Cardigan Bay and travelling NW towards SE.  The face we are looking at in the photo is the plucked face with features we often associate with the down-glacier sides of roches moutonnees.  I think there may well have been a wind-scoop feature here as well, maybe lasting for thousands of years and allowing frost shattering and scree accumulation to proceed more or less unhindered.

And another from Hugh.........

Glama Plateau and Dynjandifoss

 

I rediscovered this excellent photo on a Facebook geomorphology page, showing the Dynjandifoss waterfall (the biggest waterfall in NW Iceland) on the edge of the Glama Plateau.   We did a helicopter reconnaissance and wandered about up there back in the 1970's -- it was fascinating because it was the location of a small ice cap that has now completely disappeared.

Put "Glama" into the search box and you will find some of my other posts.  

There are more excellent photos of this area on Gareth McCormack's web site:

https://www.garethmccormack.com/product-tag/iceland-westfjord/

Close-up of the waterfall.  Photo:  Gareth McCormack

Ken Follett jumps onto the bandwaggon

 

Quercus Publishing have just announced that they will publish a new novel about Stonehenge, written by Welsh author Ken Follett -- a man with a huge following of loyal readers.  The early announcement is all over the media today -- the book will be published in September of next year.

https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/ken-folletts-circle-of-days-kicks-off-his-hachette-global-deal#:~:text=Circle%20of%20Days%20examines%20the,an%20unmatched%20ability%20to%20lead%22

Here is the press release:

Hachette has revealed details of Ken Follett’s upcoming epic, Circle of Days, which is centred around the construction of one of the world’s most iconic monuments, Stonehenge. The announcement follows the new global deal with the publisher after Follett left his long-time publisher Pan Macmillan earlier this year.

Jon Butler, managing director at Quercus, and Ben Sevier, president and publisher of Hachette Book Group’s Grand Central Publishing, announced the global English-language publication details of the newly acquired author at Frankfurt Book Fair 2024. Quercus (UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada) and Grand Central (North American rights) will release the English-language edition on 23rd September 2025.

Circle of Days examines the mystery of the creation of Stonehenge, following three characters: Seft, "a flint miner with a gift"; the girl he loves, Neen; and Joia, Neen’s sister, a priestess "with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead".

Follett said: "Stonehenge is one of the world’s most iconic and recognisable monuments but, in reality, so little is known about it. How was it built? Why was it built? Who built it? I’ve written before about moments of great human achievement and I’ve always been drawn to stories of ordinary people doing seemingly impossible things, and what could be more extraordinary than the construction of this enormous monument?"

The book will also be published in foreign-language editions in different countries around the world, including the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Follett has been sold in over 80 countries and in 40 languages.

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Of course the book will be read and judged as fiction, and nobody will be too concerned about accuracy or authenticity  -- but it is quite inevitable that it will contain an extended section dealing with the heroic finding and transport of the bluestones.  So the mythology will be developed and extended.........

No criticism of Ken Follett -- he sees an opportunity here, and he is just a poor Welsh author trying to make a living, like everybody else...........

The Nevern Estuary anomaly

One of the big igneous erratics on the foreshore of the Nevern Estuary

https://earthwise.bgs.ac.uk/index.php/Caradoc_Series,_Ordovician,_Wales

"In south-west Wales, extensive dark grey, silty, graptolitic, pyritous mudstone is Caradoc in age, and indicates that relatively deep water and low energy conditions had persisted since late Arenig times. However, in north Pembrokeshire and south Cardiganshire, the sedimentation was influenced by movement on the Newport Sands Fault. South of the fault, sedimentation was mainly of mud, which now comprises the Pen yr Aber and Cwm yr Eglwys mudstone formations. North of the fault, the upper part of the Cwm yr Eglwys Mudstone Formation interdigitates with and is overlain by turbiditic sandstone, mudstone, slumped beds and conglomerate of the Dinas Island Formation (P662414), which is well exposed in the cliff sections between Dinas Head and Poppit Sands."

According to the records, the Penyraber mudstone formation rests more or less conformably or discomformably on the complex rocks of the Llanvirn Fishguard Volcanic Group.  But according tom the geologists there must have been a long time interval between the accumulation of volcanic materials and the accumulation of the deep sea sediments above them.

Anyway, the Penyraber mudstones are typically black or dark grey, and they outcrop in the Nevern estuary  in the north side of the river, inside the sand dunes and along the shore as far as the "iron bridge".   There are no signs of interbedded or underlying volcanic deposits, and I am still pondering on the origins of the cluster of igneous erratics on the foreshore, between the high and low tide marks.  They still remind me o the strange igneous outcrops in Ty Canol Wood, but if the erratics come from there, the ice must have travelled northwards from Mynydd Preseli, and the jury is still out on that one.........

What I noticed yesterday, on one of our estuary walks, was a high concentration of stained quartz fragments, some of them quite angular, littering the beach surface near the Riverslea boat house.  There also seem to be two parallel alignments.  I must go back and examine them when I am not threatened by an incoming tide -- is there an outcrop of something interesting just beneath the beach surface?  Watch this space.......

The return of the Phantom Quarrymen

 

The recently stripped area on the flank of Carn Ddu Fach, following the latest bluestone quarry search.  Serious research, or frivolous desecration within a protected landscape?

I'm picking up on various social media comments and messages from mountain walkers that while some of the MPP team were digging September holes into the ground near the hamlet of Crosswell, the phantom quarrymen were also hard at work up in the rarified atmosphere of Mynydd Preseli, hunting for Neolithic quarries. 

Richard Bevins was at Rhosyfelin earlier in the year, doing some TV filming and  maybe collecting more samples, but otherwise there seem to have been no new excavations there.

There are rumours of work going on at Cerrig Marchogion and maybe other sites including Cerrig Lladron, but the main focus this year seems to have been Carn Ddu Fach, not far from Carn Alw and Foel Drygarn.  These sites are all flagged up as being of interest in earlier publications -- referred to initially as "possible" sources for bluestone monoliths after very modest rock sampling programmes and Xray studies in the field.  

Bevins, R. E., Pearce, N. J. G., & Ixer, R. A. (2021). Revisiting the provenance of the Stonehenge bluestones: Refining the provenance of the Group 2 non-spotted dolerites using rare earth element geochemistry. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 38, Article 103083. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2021.103083

Richard E.Bevins, Nick J.G.Pearce, Mike Parker Pearson, Rob A.Ixer
Identification of the source of dolerites used at the Waun Mawn stone circle in the Mynydd Preseli, west Wales and implications for the proposed link with Stonehenge
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports
Volume 45, October 2022, 103556

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352409X2200219X

Now, however, see see the usual distortion of the field and laboratory findings so that "possible" sources within areas of many thousands of square metres are transformed into "probable" sources associated with particular outcrops such as Cerrig Marchogion, Cerrig Lladron and Carn Ddu Fach.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2024/04/the-unhealthy-obsession-with-bluestone.html

The geological work has become very messy because of the "stone 62" fiasco (remember the pentagonal footprint?) and the pantomime surrounding the imaginary "Lost Circle" at Waun Mawn.  But apparently the MPP team members are unapologetic about all of that, and are as obsessed as ever with finding bluestone monolith quarries..........

So to Carn Ddu Fach, which might (no stronger than that) be an approximate source for one of the Stonehenge unspotted dolerite bluestones.  Walkers up in the mountains report quite a mess up there, with the grassy turf stripped off the edges of the dolerite outcrops and then crudely replaced.  There are also yellow metal pins hammered into the turf.

Is this the "void" which the diggers assume to have been a stone extraction point?

According to reports of the latest MPP talk at the Bluestone Brewery, the learned professor claims that the diggers found a "void" from which a bluestone monolith had been taken, and also at least one "wedge" used in the quarrying process. He referred to a "stone extraction point" that appears no more convincing than the one that supposedly exists at Rhosyfelin.   Oh dear --- here we go again...........  Visitors to the site say that the void is a completely natural one not dissimilar to the voids, holes and gaps found all over these Preseli tors; and they say they can see not the slightest trace of quarrying activities.  

(It needs to be said that there ARE prehistoric quarrying sites on Preseli, and that they are characterised by distinct pits or stone extraction hollows, piles of waste rubble and transport trackways.  These features are NOT present at Rhosyfelin, Carn Goedog or Carn Ddu Fach...........)

Finally there are whispers of further "surprises" at Waun Mawn -- so maybe the gang members have not completely given up on that site and its fantastical narrative.  Watch this space.

A visitor who took some photos at the Carn Ddu Fach site wonders whether this small stone just above the centre of the photo (between the recumbent block and the bedrock outcrop) is interpreted by the quarrymen as a "quarrying wedge" rather like those they claim to have found at Carn Goedog.   

Prof Tim Darvill

 I was saddened to hear about the passing, on 5th October, of Prof Tim Darvill.  Another victim of cancer, after a short illness, at the age of 66. 

Tim was of course one of the leading archaeologists of his day, with a wide range of interests and an impressive publications list.  He spent most of his academic career in the University of Bournemouth.  His work on Stonehenge and the bluestones was of course well known, and in West Wales his extensive chapter on "Neolithic and Bronze Age Pembrokeshire" written with Geoff Wainwright and published in Vol 1 of the Pembrokeshire County History (2016) was and is hugely influential. 

I disagreed with some of his ideas and agreed with others, and occasionally we exchanged messages and opinions.  I always found him polite and reasonable in his responses to my ideas, and he was kind enough to offer and provide help in the analysis of the Newall Boulder stored in Salisbury Museum.  Some of the data which he provided were incorporated into my article published in Quaternary Science Journal in June of this year.

To his credit, Tim recognized and acknowledged disputes in his field of interest, and was happy to cite the work of those with whom he disagreed.  Not everybody does that.........  He was one of the few archaeologists who was prepared to go on the record, in print, to express his concern about the elaborate narrative woven by Parker Pearson and his team around the Pembrokeshire bluestones.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2022/11/darvill-on-waun-mawn-myth.html

Tim's 2022 article was important, not least in demonstrating that I was not alone in having serious doubts about the reliability of the evidence and the spectacular claims made in recent years by Parker Pearson, Ixer, Bevins and others.

May he rest in peace.

MPP, Bluestone Brewery, 2024

 

MPP was at the Bluestone Brewery, giving his annual lecture to the assembled faithful.  Nobody seems to remember much of what he said, which means that he probably didn't say anything particularly memorable.  That's a compliment, not a criticism -- for the last ten years these talks have been used for flagging up one pretty outrageous "discovery" or "finding" after another, based upon the flimsiest of evidence -- only for all of them to be ditched or modified in short order when people like myself have questioned the wild and spectacular components of the narrative.

Have MPP and the team now settled down to doing some quiet and systematic studies of ring features in the Crosswell area, with an emphasis on teaching students the basic principles of field archaeology?  Since the first studies at Pensarn a few years ago, the work seems to have entered a new phase, in which Stonehenge features not at all.  Thank God for that.........

Anyway, the whispers from the convivial evening suggest that Waun Mawn is no longer part of the investigation re Stonehenge.  MPP has finally accepted that it was -- at best -- a monument that was never finished, and abandoned after a short space of time.  He still insists on the "discovery"of  holes intended for stones that never were put into position before the site was given up on.  I don't accept that, but he has to hang onto something, I suppose.  

The focus is now elsewhere in Preseli, notably at Crosswell, where several ring features or embanked enclosures can be seen on satellite images.  There are also subtle mounds worth investigating.  The suggestion seems to be that these features are mostly from the Bronze Age and later -- but that there may be Neolithic traces beneath.  That would not be surprising, given that there are abundant Neolithic traces in the wider landscape, as recorded over many years of research by other archaeologists.  

On the geological front, there is a suggestion that the geologists (Ixer and Bevins) are looking at natural outcrops and boulder blockfields around the ridge where a match for the volcanic characteristics of some bluestones and fragments has been found.  That would not be surprising either -- although the idea of spot provenancing and the discovery of more "quarrying sites" looks increasingly absurd.