According to the Daily Mail......

Photography as a substitute for science.......

 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14928191/Stonehenge-mystery-SOLVED-boulder-transported.html

Shock!  Horror!  Stonehenge mystery finally SOLVED!   For the first time this month......

Note the capital letters.

So if it's in the Daily Mail, it must be true.  This time, the truth seems to be that the glacial transport theory is dead.  Not so long ago it was the human transport theory that was dead.  The truth does not last long in fhe media.  But we knew that already.

Anyway, the paper -- like assorted other media outlets -- has picked up on the latest press release from Bevins et al (2025), issued in a feverish attempt to dismiss my work on the Newall Boulder and to prove that the glacial transport theory is dead.  Hmmm.  As Mark Twain might have said, reports of its death have been grossly exaggerated.........

Here are a few thoughts on the newsaper article -- and by implication, on the linked press release.

At the outset, we see this claim:  Bevins et al concluded that "there is no evidence to support the interpretation that it (the Newall Boulder) is a glacial erratic.".  That is an absurd claim.  "Evidence" is defined as facts or information brought forward to support or refute a claim, idea or hypothesis.  As a matter of fact there is abundant evidence in the literature in support of the glacial erratic interpretation.  Whether Bevins et al support it or reject it is another matter entirely.  If they believe that the evidence is unconvincing, that is what they should have said.

As is already apparent, I happen to find the evidence presented in their latest paper defective in a number of respects, as I will shortly explain. They should accept that with good grace.

The Newall Boulder (NB) is a precise match for the unique characteristics of rocks from Craig Rhosyfelin.?  No it isn't.  For a start, it looks different, which explains why it has been described by other geologists as an "ignimbrite" and as a strongly welded acid vitric tuff.  The "matching" presented in the paper by Bevins et al (2025) involves a highly biased and selective presentation of evidence, and the geologists involved have still not demonstrated that the characteristics of the Rhosyfelin foliated ryolite are totally unique to that site, since the density of the sampling points and the range of their fieldwork in the area are far from adequate.

There are columns of foliated rhyolite at Rhosyfelin which have bullet-shaped or rounded tops similar to that of the NB?  Well, there is very little in the way of columnar jointing at the site.  And rounded and abraded surfaces on the higher parts of the crag are replicated on almost all of the tors of Preseli, and are interpreted by me and other geomorphologists as indicative of glacial or fluvioglacial abrasion in the past.  This tells us nothing about the provenance of the boulder, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

There is evidence of stone quarrying at the Rhosyfelin site?  So Bevins et al would have us believe -- but they might have had the good grace to acknowledge that their evidence has been hotly disputed since 2015.  And readers deserve to know that until now Bevins and his colleagues have refused to cite the peer-reviewed studies that draw concusions that are at odds with their own.  That in itself is enough to destroy their credibility as "experts".

The NB surface is rich in calcium carbonate deposits?  This suggests long burial either at stonehenge oft elsewhere.  On that we agree.  But I cannot for the life of me see how that reinforces the idea of human transport!  On the contrary, it provides strong support for everything i have said about the glacial transport and dumping of erratic materials from west to east.

It is claimed that if a glacier had carried the NB from West Wales to Salisbury Plain, or near it, it would have also left a scatter of similar stones across the region.   That is a fair point, but we still do not know how extensive the ice cover was, or what the glaciological conditions might have been.  There are erratics dotted about all over Salisbury Plain, as itemised by Thorpe et al in 1991, and it is worth reminding ourselves that only 50% of the stone settings part of Stonehenge has ever been excavated.   Therefore all statements by Ixer, Bevins and other about the frequency or type of rock fragments at the site will in due course have to be substantially revised.

BLUESTONE 32d -- new analysis shows it to be a foliated rhyolite like that of the NB?  This is a lie.  The stump that was revealed in old excavations was photographed, but not sampled.  So all we have is a speculation, based on a photograph.  This is slapdash and misleading science -- as we saw some months ago when a lump of rock bought in a rock shop in Harrogate was used as a surrogate in a study of the Altar Stone.  In the eyes of many this seriously devalued the study and increased scepticism about its results.

Are  there  80 bluestones at Stonehenge?  This is often claimed.  But there are in fact only 43 monoliths and stumps, and in the view of the present author it is most likely that the planned stone monument was never completed.....

The image of a "typical collection of rock fragments" at Stonehenge.  This is worthless, since a collection and display of stone chips is exactly what it says it is.  It has no value as a piece of scientific information.  Other stone shapes are available at Stonehenge, but as far as I am aware, there has never been a controlled study of stone shapes in or beyond the stone settings.

Come to think of it, on the matter of stone shapes, has anybody ever looked at the full assemblage of Stonehenge monoliths and said "These stones were most certainly all quarried!". On the contrary, whenever I have asked geomorphologist colleagues about this, the response has always been "These stones are most certainly NOT quarried..........". That, of course, is, in my humble opinion, because they are all glacial erratics.

The Daily Mail article ends with a statement to the effect that "John's arguments have no basis in evidence.  To present it as fact, rather than hypothesis, is disingenuous."

That is all absurd.  I have never pretended that my conclusions are facts rather than opinions.  Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.......

Tim's Tiresome Triumphalist Tirades

 Here we go again.  Our old friend Tim Daw has taken to the media again to gleefully announce to the world -- or to his small part of it -- that the bluestone glacial transport hypothesis is dead.  His somewhat misplaced confidence is all based on the new article by the "gang of eleven" about the Newall Boulder, which I will deal with in due course.  Tim clearly thinks the article is the last word on the matter of glacial transport, demonstrating that he knows remarkably little about either the literature or the science.  He's clearly the stooge here -- but I wonder who put him up to it?

He has made some rather excitable pronouncements on Twitter (now X) which I can't get at since Mr Musk has decided that I am not a bona fide follower or disciple.  Something about the new paper "refuting any glacial transport"...........

Then on his blog he maintains his attack, using rather intemperate language.  Most of his posts pass me by, but I do read some of them. But he never, as far as I can see, allows dissent or discussion on his blog, and that point alone says everything we need to know.  It's all froth.....

His latest stunt involves an unattributed opinion on my recent post about the modelling of the British and Irish Ice sheet.  He puts the "opinion" in quotes, to show that the words are not his, but there is no way that the words are going to be taken seriously by me or anybody else, since they come from somebody hiding behind a cloak of anonymity. 

More serious is Tim's use of Researchgate in an attempt to give his outpourings a degree of "scientific respectability".  I have already pointed out his very dodgy use of AI on Researchgate as a substitude for individual academic scrutiny -- I am surprised that the moderators have allowed him to get away with it.  His latest piece, for which he claims authorship, has the grandiose title :  "The Demise of the Glacial Transport Theory for Stonehenge's Magaliths."  It's a short opinion piece, perhaps better defined as a personal attack, and I will of course respond to it when the tools of the trade are more readily to hand. (I'm on holiday in Sweden at the moment, dealing with the peculiarities of an iPad.......)

Washed surfaces and ice-transported boulders

 

 

Shoreline nwith a heavy concentration of erratic boulders on the coast of Granöören, near the eastern tip of Blidö, Stockholm Archipelago.  The coastline here is cut into a thick deposit of till, and the fines have been washed out by wave action.  When a "stillstand" occurs, with a rough equivalence of eustatic sea level rise and isostatic recovery rate, the concentration of boulders on the shoreline may be more pronounced.

I am intrigued that the geologists and geomorphologists who are "embedded" in the Stonehenge establishment still apparently believe that the big boulders dotted around the coasts of the Bristol Channel were transported by  floating sea ice and icebergs rather than by glacier ice.  This flies in the face of everything we know about glacial processes and about the Pleistocene history of the region, since nobody has yet demonstrated that the relative  positions of global sea level and the Bristol Channel coasts were close to those of today at a time when debris-laden icebergs could have been grounded between the tide marks.  On the contrary, on those occasions when ice-rafted debris might have been moved about in the channel, relative sea level must have been far below that of the present day, and the coastline must have been many miles away from its present position.   To argue that isostatic depression of the landmass caused the coastline to sink by an amount precisely equivalent to the eustatic sea level fall involves special pleading -- and there is no evidence to support it.

I am genuinely at a loss to understand what is to be gained by the continued promotion of the lRD (ice rafted debris) hypothesis, unless you want to fly in the face of the evidence and pretend (for rather obvious reasons) that the coasts of Devon and Cornwall were never glaciated.........

I am reminded of this rather silly argument every time I paddle the kayak around the coasts of the Stockholm Archipelago, which were once submerged beneath 100m or more of sea water.  The boulder-lined shorelines that we see everywhere are all the products of wave sapping of rock surfaces and exposed glacial sediments.  Wave action across a relatively narrow vertical range of a metre or two (there are no tides in the Baltic) removes all the finer materials -- clay, silt, sand and gravel -- and leaves behind the cobbles and the boulders.   If you tried to suggest to any Swedish geomorphologist that ice- rafting had anything at all to do with the presence of these big boulders, you would be laughed out of court.

So can we just have a bit of common sense here?

Was there a Bristol Channel Ice Stream?

 

The revised model from Ely et al.  The white areas show thin ice and sluggish or non-existent ice movement. The purple areas show ice streams or zones of relatively rapid ice flow.  Note the big Irish Sea ice stream and the much smaller but associated Bristol Channel ice stream heading east and pushing onto the Somerset Levels.

Thanks to Bevins et al (2025) for pointing me towards this article:

J.C. Ely, C.D. Clark, S.L. Bradley, L. Gregoire, N. Gandy, E.Gasson, R.L.J. Veness, R. Archer
Early View. Behavioural tendencies of the last British-Irish Ice Sheet revealed by data-model comparison
Journal of Quaternary Science. (2024)

It's a comprehensive and very specialised study of the hundreds of computer models of the behaviour of the British and Irish Ice Sheet (which also goes by several other names)  -- most of them relating the the Devensian glaciation.  They range from maximal to minimalist models and from extreme ones to ultra cautious ones.  Many of the older models can be rejected because the parameters used in their creation are now inadequate -- but the work of the BRITICE project has stimulated a new generation of models with much greater and more careful ground truthing used to check on their viability and accuracy.

Anyway, in tying everything up at the end of an extensive analysis, the authors produced a map for the southern part of the Ice Sheet which showed that (a) the ice sheet must have crossed the coastal barrier of Devon and Cornwall and impinged upon the small local ice caps of ther SW Peninsula (Dartmoor and Exmoor in particular) and (b) that there might well have been an eastwards flowing ice stream in the Bristol Channel.

I must admit that the latter suggestion (it is no more than that) came as a surprise to me, since previoius models have almost always suggested that the Bristol Channel was largely ice free at the times of extensive glaciation.  Partly, as I have pointed out many times on this blog, this defect arose from the assumption of an ice-free enclave in South Pembrokeshire, which makes no sense from a glaciological perspective.  So now we have a modern and apparently reliable model that agrees substantially with the situation portrayed in these mapped reconstructions:

After Kellaway, Williams-Thorpe and others

After Gilbertson and Hawkins

My own suggestion

Note that the latest modelled reconstruction shows ice pressing across the whole of Cornwall, and that the model does not show the greatest extent of Devensian ice in the Celtic  Sea.  Here the modelled outer edge of the Celtic Sea piedmont glacier is shown around the position of the Isles  of Scilly.  But as Scourse and others have pointed out, the extreme position was much further to the south, at the shelf edge.  At that time the ice must have been thicker and more extensive in the Bristol Channel, with accelerated streaming and a progression well inland of the Somerset coast.

Gradually, it all comes together............

The Stonehenge Lynch Mob marches out............

 

Well, this is fun.  The Stonehenge Lynch Mob has assembled all its forces and has marched out in the light of the midsummer moon, determined to string me up from the nearest trilithon.........

Their latest paper, a long and rambling (and in places repetitive) attack published in the Journal of Artchaeological Sciences, has no less than 11 authors, including MPP, Mike Pitts, geologists Bevins and Ixer, geomorphologist Jim Scourse, and archaeologist David Field.  Our old friend Tim Daw is in there as well.  

We have been waiting for this paper for some time, since it was prematurely cited by MPP et al towards the end of last year.   It was clearly rejected by the Journal of Quaternary Science in January 2025,  and later accepted (with revisions) by the Journal of Archaeological Science.  Make of that what you will.........

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2025/02/myths-fantasies-and-now-phantom-articles.html

There is a wonderful irony in the fact that the defenders of the establishment narrative have here written a long and detailed paper designed to destroy the "glacial transport hypothesis" and the credibility of my 2024 paper, having for the greater part of a decade refused to cite any of my publications or acknowledge that their bluestone narrative is disputed by anybody.  Indeed, I have complained on many occasions of their academic malpractice in this regard.  Suddenly, I find myself cited, not just once or twice, but in paragraph after paragraph of this new paper, with multiple quotations added in italics!  So I am very flattered.......

Who would have thought that a little boulder found in a cardboard box could have attracted so much attention?  Newall would have been delighted.

Don't you just love the title of the article?  ".... correcting the record."  The authors clearly think that they have replaced something dodgy with something authoritative and utterly reliable.  Hmmm.  Their arrogance knows no bounds.  Maybe I should now write something called "The Stonehenge Bluestones:  the truth" ??  What they have actually done, in this new paper, is to present a string of assertions and speculations as facts, as I shall demonstrate when I publish my detailed scrutiny.  Their over-interpretation of questionable evidence is par for the course; they do it all the time.

Watch  this space..........

=============================

Richard E. Bevins, Nick J.G. Pearce, Rob A. Ixer, James Scourse, Tim Daw, Mike Parker Pearson, Mike Pitts, David Field, Duncan Pirrie, Ian Saunders, Matthew Power, The enigmatic ‘Newall boulder’ excavated at Stonehenge in 1924: New data and correcting the record, 

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Volume 66, 2025, 105303, 

ISSN 2352-409X, 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105303.

Plumstone Rock

Somehow or other, Plumstone rock has escaped our attention.  It is a prominent rhyolite tor located on the ridge of Ordovician volcanic  rocks that runs between Roch Castle in the west (near Newgale)  and Trefgarn Gorge in the east.  The most prominent crags on the ridge are Poll Carn (Lion Rock) and nearby Maiden Castke (called by the locals the "family of lions" for obvious reasons).   

The rocks are for the most part flinty bluish rholotes, with considerable internal variation, including welded tuffs and agglomerates.  In certain light conditions the rocks appear to be pinkish or orange in colour.  The age of these rocks was disputed for many years, having been originally labelled as Precambrian -- but they now seem to be accepted as Ordovician.

The rock is hugely impressive and intimidating -- but  it is easily accessible from the Haverfordwest - Hayscastle road, and there is an easy short walk to the tor from the car parking area on the common.

It does not have the fragility of  Maiden Castle, and while the bulk of the tor is solid bedrock, on its flanks there are numerous massive detached blocks.  It is -- naturally enough -- a facvourite place for "bouldering".  I have not seen any striated surfaces on the tor, but there are some forms that are suggestive of ice moulding.  The big question is this -- what do the four tors on this ridge tell us about the history of glaciation across Pembrokeshire?