Foel Drygarn -- the prehistoric quarry they chose not to see

The Foel Drygarn prehistoric quarry complex, showing the four areas from which thousands of tonnes of stone (mostly small angular slabs) have been removed for construction projects

 Hidden in plain sight?  So prominent that it was mistaken for something else?  Whatever the reason might have been, I don't think there is any mention, anywhere in the flood of articles about the "monolith quarries" at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog, of the Foel Drygarn quarrying complex which extends over   15,000sq m (300m x 50m) on the flank of the Foel Drygarn hill summit. According to my calculations, over 14,000 tonnes of stone have been shifted:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-foel-drygarn-quarries-what-is.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-prehistoric-quarries-at-foel-drygarn.html

Parker Pearson, Ixer, Bevins and the others must have known about it, since it is specifically  mentioned in reports by Coflein / Archwilio in and around 1968.  The word "quarries" is used in two places in the published map of the site, following work by Hogg and others.  And it is so obvious that you can't miss it, if you wander about near the hill summit today -- mercifully free of covering vegetation and available for easy inspection in all its detail.  I have described it in a number of posts on this blog.  Nobody has questioned or denied the accuracy of what I have described.

So Parker Pearson et al knew about the quarry and chose to ignore it.  Why?  Well, it was only too obviously very inconvenient indeed, since it did nothing to confirm their fantsastical "monolith extraction" narrative.

If they had had any respect for the due processes of scientific investigation, the first thing that they would have done, when the idea of quarrying came into the frame, was to ask "what do we know already about prehistoric stone quarrying in the upland terrain of Mynydd Preseli?".   They would have visited and investigated the site. looking for any lessons that might be learned.  But of course that would not have served their purpose..........

If they had looked at Foel Drygarn, their papers on Rhosyfelin, Carn Goedog and Waun Mawn would have looked very different, and indeed might not have been written at all.

So what does Foel Drygarn tell us about stone quarrying in Mynydd Preseli around 1,500 - 2,000 years after the date of the supposed stone extraction from the "bluestone monolith quarries"?    We would expect the Foel Drygarn quarrying operation to have been more sophisticated,  since the quarrymen would have had access to metal tools and maybe metal wedges too.  But we find traces of quarrying work that was in essence very simple indeed. As far as we can see, the quarrymen took no slabs of rock from exposed rock faces -- they were only interested in taking small slabs from accumulations of scree.  They concentrated on slabs and small blocks up to c 30 kg in weight, capable of being handled by two men.  They were not interested in large boulders, and indeed left them behind as they cleared out smaller fragments from the scree slopes.  The "lag concentrations" are obvious in places towards the eastern end of the quarrying complex.  They left abundant traces of their stone extraction work -- interconnected pits and hollows, conical mounds of debris, ridges left between adjacent pits, abundant trackways, clean rock faces, and accumulations of unwanted boulders.  

Accumulation of boulders in a rough arc against one of the eastern dolerite crags.  At first I thought this was an arcuate enclosure similar to those at Carn Edward and elsewhere -- but now I think the boulder litter covers too large an area, and that we are looking at the "lag boulder assortment" left behind after the collection of smaller (useful) blockfield debris.  

The lessons for "quarrying studies" in West Wales?  Well, the quarrymen left clear and incontrovertible evidence of their activities.  Such evidence of landscape scarring  is conspicuously missing from Carn Meini, Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog.  Secondly,  there is no evidence at Foel Drygarn of any external influence on the quarrymen -- they were obtaining the local raw materials needed for their own local projects, and saw no need to bring in any stones from outside the immediate locality.  This is entirely in tune with the scenario at all the other megalithic settings in West Wales -- none of them used imported stone from elsewhere.  In other words, there is no need to speculate about sacred or high value stone derived from special places.  As for the "engineering features" like loading platforms, sliding rails, loading bays, ramps, stone wedges, rock face extraction recesses, hammer stones and revetments, they are entirely absent from Foel Drygarn. (They are also, in my opinion, entirely missing from the supposed Neolithic quarry sites as well.  This is argued by me and my colleages John Downes and Dyfed Elis Gruffydd.)

To summarise:

1.  Genuine prehistoric stone quarries leave reconizeable scars in the landscape that cannot be explained by reference to natural processes.

2.  Prehistoric quarrymen prioritized "minimum effort" rather than being driven by some sacred or ritual motivation to do heroic and exceptional things.  They were opportunists and pragmatists.

3. In the case of Foel Drygarn the quarrymen took loose and accessible surface materials -- rocks and smaller debris -- in preference to trying to extract slabs and pillars from exposed rock faces.  Blockfield debris, scree and glacial litter could be easily exploited and c 14,000 tonnes were moved.

In other words, the evidence from the Bronze Age and Iron Age quarrying operations at Foel Drygarn porovides no support whatever for the fantastical Neolithic bluestone extraction narrative invented by Parker Pearson and his colleagues.  

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Reference:

Archive Collection: A.H.A. Hogg Foel Drygarn / Moel Trigarn Survey Plans (1968) RCAHMW document. 

Not digitised, as far as I can make out.........

Here are rather poor copies of two of the maps:

.

Prehistoric quarries in Pembrokeshire: three fantasies and one real but ignored

 

In the Foel Drygarn prehistoric quarry stone has been taken from at least four scree and blockfield locations associated with several different rock types.

In many posts on this blog I have referred to the disputes concerning the "monolith quarries" at three places:  Carn Meini (Carn Menyn), Craig Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog.  The first of these was accepted as real by many archaeologists for the best part of a century, having been promoted in the writings of HH Thomas, Richard Atkinson and others and then "adopted" by Darvill and Wainwright in association with their "healing stones" hypothesis.  It took a knock when Bevins and Ixer suggested that most of the spotted dolerites at Stonehenge had probably not come from there at all, but from Carn Goedog.  Together with Parker Pearson, the two geologists have been instrumental since 2010 in suggesting that the petrology of bluestone monoliths  and debitage at Stonehenge points to two major sources -- Carn Goedog for most spotted dolerites, and Rhosyfelin for the foliated rhyolites that occur in collections of fragments found in Stonehenge digs. (There are no Rhosyfelin standing stones.)   They decided that there must have been quarries at those two sites, and of course, confirmed their ruling hypothesis by finding them, much to their own satisfaction.

As I have pointed out on multiple occasions on this blog, the evidence of actual prehistoric quarrying at those three sites does not withstand scrutiny.  The "evidence" is so flimsy as to be laughable, and the conclusion has to be that the three sites display multiple features that are entirely consistent with the operation of natural processes over the course of many thousands of years of oscillating climate. That having been said, I would accept that the rock outcrops at Rhosyfelin might have been used by hunting parties over thousands of years for the provision of sharp-edged disposable cuttiong tools suitable for skinning animals and carving meat.  Also, I would accept that the two spotted dolerite "quarrying" sites have been used by local farmers within the past 300 years for the provision of stone gateposts -- as indeed have other Preseli tors.  And the deacons of the local nonconformist chapels have also taken many cartloads of dolerite blocks for the provision of "posh" facades on their chapels. (This was documented by my late friend Dyfed Elis Gruffydd in Welsh language publications.) The stones were NOT taken because they were supposed to be "sacred" or spiritually siognificant......

So let's get serious.  There are three candidates for REAL prehistoric stone quarries in Mynydd Preseli, excluding abundant small pits and hollows all over the upland landscape that might well mark the positions of large stones used in local prehistoric stone settings.  The locations are Bwlch Ungwr, Cnwc yr Hydd and Foel Drygarn.  The small feature at Bwlch Ungwr, discovered by Hugh 360, is worthy of further investigation.  I have mentioned in on this blog already.   Much more impressive is the quarry pit on the summit of Cnwc yr Hydd, near Waun Mawn, and the string of linked pits on the slope below.  I have given these plenty of space on this blog, for example here:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-geology-of-waun-mawn.html

The Cnwc yr Hydd quarries are prominent features in the landscape, but in all the publications by Parker Pearson and his colleagues about Waun Mawn, they are completely ignored -- in spite of being located within a few hundred metres of their infamous "lost circle" of standing stones. Exposures show that these quarries have been used for the provision of slabs of meta-mudstone or foliated rhyolite suitable for domestic and farm buildings and stone walls. Transport of the slabs downhill in open countryside was very easy. My guess is that the quarries are all modern -- exploited within the past 300 years. There is nothing to suggest prehistoric use.

This leaves us with just one demonstrably prehistoric quarry -- at Foel Drygarn, close to the summit of the hill. In this case there is nothing to demonstrate modern use, and indeed it would not make much sense for local farmers to collect rubble from here, given its abundance across the countryside lower down.......

The quarrying activities have been quite extensive here -- there were at least four distinct areas of exploitation. These are shown in my various publications on this blog, for example:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2017/04/foeldrygarn-prehistoric-quarries.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-prehistoric-quarries-at-foel-drygarn.html

The quarries are probably not Neolithic, since the main activities on this site were apparently concentrated in the Bronze Age (with the construction of three massive burial mounds) and in the Iron Age (with the construction of the fortified "village").  

Nonetheless, there are some significant features of the Foel Drygarn quarrying complex:

1.  The presence of suitable rock resources was a prime determinant in the location of the human features on the site -- namely three burial mounds, fortified embankments and a tribal village with maybe a few hundred inhabitants.  This supports what Stephen Briggs has concluded from his studies of other prehistoric features elsewhere in Wales.

2.  The targetted rock resources were  small and manageable slabs of broken rhyolite, dolerite and meta mudstone.  The quarrymen were NOT interested in megaliths or monoliths.

3.  The slabs were almost all capable of being carried by one man or by two men working together.

4.  The exploited rock resources were not rock faces but scree slopes and blockfields created by prolonged  periglacial activity during the Quaternary.

5.  All the collected rock slabs and blocks were collected within 60m or so of their places of use.  Many were carried uphill for about 20m -- this effort was clearly preferable to the effort of carring in other rocks from external sources.  In cost / benefit terms, the effort was worthwhile.

6.  There are abundant and distinct physical traces of the quarrying activity -- extraction pits, waste mounds and ridges, and haulage trackways.  In places so much scree has been removed that the rock face beneath has been exposed. There are no traces of tools, because none were needed.

7.  I have estimated that c 14,000 tonnes of rock debris has been moved on the summit of Foel Drygarn. Some will have come from the immediate proximity of building or defensive work within the confines of the Iron Age village, but most must have come from the quarries.

8.  Adjacent to one or two of the dolerite outcrops there are litters of large boulders and slabs (of bluestone monolith size!) that have simply been left behind while the quarrymen have carried away all of the smaller clasts for use in the burial mounds or fortified embankments. 

So what are the lessons for those who insist that 80 Stonehenge bluestones were quarried from the living rock with the use of wedges and hammer stones, and transported all the way to Salisbury Plain thousands of years before Foel Drygarn was occupied and exploited?

There is a wonderful irony here.  The one place where there is hard evidence of prehistoric stone quarrying  is completely ignored by mainstream orthodoxy because it doesn't serve the Stonehenge origin story. At Foel Drygarn we see genuine, empirical evidence of prehistoric stone working in the Preseli region -- with the Bronze Age and later exploitation of local stone for highly practical, manageable architectural features. This system fits standard technological expectations perfectly: 

Local Scope: The slabs were extracted to build immediate, regional structures like the defensive walls of hillforts (such as Carn Alw or Carningli) or the burial cairns dotting the hills (such as Carn Briw or Foel Feddau).

Proportionate Scale: The stones were sized to be manageable by a local community working within the physical constraints of their immediate neighborhood.  Common sense prevailed.

Visible Infrastructure: Unlike the alleged Stonehenge quarries, this practical exploitation leaves behind clear, unambiguous traces of extraction and use that do not require speculative ancient psychology to explain.

By completely sidelining this genuine prehistoric quarrying tradition, mainstream archaeologists expose their own confirmation bias. They ignore a real, visible, and logical stone-working evidence right under their noses while spending millions of pounds trying to prove that natural, frost-shattered rock faces at Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin are high-tech Neolithic megalith production lines.

This selective blindness confirms that the promoters of the orthodox narrative are not interested in the actual, messy, practical reality of prehistoric stone use in Wales. They requires a pristine, monumental, long-distance fantasy to keep the "sacred transport" myth alive..............  How sad is that?

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The Coflein record for Foel Drygarn is extraordinarily bland and lacking in rigour:

https://coflein.gov.uk/en/sites/94948/images

It completely fails to recognize the stone quarries near the summit, and does not even wonder where all the stone used in the Bronze Age and Iron Age features actually came from.

The collapse of the Preselite Myth: axe studies show that spotted dolerite was NEVER considered special or sacred

 

Stone axes come in many shapes and sizes.  Those that were made of "bluestone" were  strictly used as tools and were broken, re-fashioned sometimes, maybe sharpened, and then thrown away, having zero value or ritual significance.  In contrast, stone items from elsewhere that were prized evolved over time into ritual or ceremonial items, in highly polished versions, and associated with high status.  Such prized items are significantly missing from the British Preselite or bluestone axe catalogue, demonstrating that the very few bluestone axes that were made were throwaway items that had no value.  

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I have been digging deeply into the geological and archaeological debitage (appropriate word) at Stonehenge, and am appalled by what I have discovered.  So what is it?  Nothing less than the smashed up and discredited remains of a grandiose and totally false narrative.

Let's start with the Wilsford G54 ceremonial battle axe.  I have dealt with it briefly in another post, but on digging deeper I found this, from the English Heritage text:  

"Material: Spotted dolerite... It is made of the same material as the bluestones at Stonehenge and may well have been fashioned from a piece of one of these stones." 

The Wilsford ceremonial battle axe -- not Neolithic, and not Preselite......

As EH must know, this is a falsehood. The South-West Implement Petrology Group classified it in the County Register WILTS44 as an unspotted, medium-grained dolerite (diabase), lacking the characteristic macrophenocrysts of altered plagioclase feldspar that define the "spotted" Preselite (Group XIII) facies. While it is geochemically a dolerite within the broader Welsh/regional igneous spectra (Group XXIII), it is visually and texturally unspotted. It's also dated to the Bronze Age, not the Neolithic.

Back in 1999 (and in later years) Olwen Williams-Thorpe and others had already targetted museum pieces labelled visually as "Preselite" and had proved that multiple implements in Wiltshire collections —including unspotted variants like the Wilsford battle-axe—did not demonstrate a single provenance. Instead, they matched a wider, fragmented geological signature perfectly consistent with raw material collection from naturally scattered glacial drift deposits..

Williams-Thorpe, O., Potts, P.J., and Webb, P.C., 1999. Field-portable non-destructive X-ray fluorescence analysis of stone axe-heads. Journal of Archaeological Science, 26(2), pp. 215-237.

So EH is peddling a false narrative concerning the sacred or special nature of spotted dolerite at Stonehenge, as others have promoted the label "Preselite" for a special rock type from a specific place in West Wales and used for the manufacture of prized stone axes.   This has all the makings of a very murky business.  So where did the myth of the Preselite axes  come from?

I have been confused about this for some time.  In many of my posts I have referred to "Preselite" and to group XIII axes, but specific literature is distinctly lacking, and there are hardly any images of Preselite axes in circulation.  So where are these axes, and why are they apparently all being hidden away in museum cardboard boxes rather than being displayed as sacred or ritual objects?

More to the point, if bluestones (and especially those referred to as spotted dolerite or Preselite) were deemed to be special or sacred enough to be quarried in West Wales and for 80 of them to be hauled to Stonehenge, where are the axes that demonstrate their ritual significance?   Well, it turns out that there are very few of them in existence -- maybe 30 or 40 at the most -- and that these are not sophisticated works of art like the Wilsford Axe, but rough and ready items that had no ceremonial or ritual value at all.  Also, many of the axes which were originally referred to as Preselite (group XIII) have now been shown not to be in that category at all.  Some of those are now referred to as group VIII axes (rhyolites and tuffs), and others as group XXIII (assorted dolerites or diabases).  Within group XXIII there are subdivisions relating to the varying plagioclase-pyroxene mineral textures found across the igneous intrusive complexes of West Wales).

What are the physical characteristics of the few "Preselite" axes that actually are made of spotted dolerite?  

What we see are  crude, heavy-duty engineering tools.  They stand in stark contrast to the elegant, glassy, highly polished "prestige" stone axes seen elsewhere in Neolithic Europe.   Because spotted dolerite (diabase) is a coarse, intrusive igneous rock, its physical composition dictated exactly how prehistoric craftspeople had to handle it.   The body of a fresh axe varies from a dark greenish-grey to a deep, near-black tone. When weathered or exposed to acidic soil for millennia, the surface oxidizes into a dull, light-grey or pale-greenish crust (patination).  The defining visual trait is a scattering of irregular, creamy-white or buff spots. These are altered crystals of plagioclase feldspar. In some axes, these spots are dense and conspicuous; in others, they are completely sparse, bleeding directly into "unspotted" facies of the same rock in many exposures.  Unlike flint, chert, or tuff, dolerite lacks a highly fluid, predictable conchoidal fracture. It does not peel off in elegant, razor-thin flakes.  Consequently, known Group XIII axes feature deep, stepped, blocky flake scars. The edges are naturally jagged and irregular rather than smooth.  True to their utilitarian nature, these tools were rarely polished across their entire surface. Grinding and smoothing were almost exclusively confined to the cutting edge (the bit) to produce a working wedge. The main body or "butt" of the axe was left roughly pecked, uneven, and coarse to provide a high-friction grip when lashed into a wooden handle.

Group XIII axes are notably thick and heavy relative to their length. They feature broad, oval, or sub-rectangular cross-sections. Because the stone is prone to breaking if knapped too thin, craftspeople left them bulky. They were designed to rely on raw mass and momentum for chopping, clearing brush, or crushing, rather than acting as fine, sharp slicing blades.  The overwhelming physical characteristic of nearly every recovered specimen is severe wear and tear. They look like tools that were used hard and pushed to their mechanical limits.  The cutting edges are frequently uneven or lopsided, showing clear evidence of repeated, ad-hoc re-sharpening after the blade chipped or blunted on impact.  The back end (poll) of the axe head often exhibits heavy crushing, splintering, and impact fractures. This indicates they were frequently used as heavy wedges and directly struck with wooden or stone mallets to split timber or pry open rock fissures.  They are rarely found in pristine, perfect condition. They are typically recovered as broken fragments or completely exhausted, stunted stubs that were casually discarded into domestic rubbish pits or left scattered in agricultural topsoils once they could no longer be re-sharpened.

In short, the physical profile of a known Preselite axe is that of an ugly, rugged utilitarian tool. Its design prioritized survival against heavy mechanical shock, completely lacking the aesthetic artistry, glassy finish, and delicate proportions associated with prehistoric items of high value or spiritual status like the jadeite or Langdale axes which are found in great abundance.

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The spotted dolerite / Preselite myth already looks very shaky indeed, so let's just look at its origins.  Probably the myth started with Rev Done Bushell who thought that megalithic monumente were so abundant in eastern Preseli and the mid-Pembrokeshire foothills were that there must have been a sort of "Prehistoric Westminster" there.  Around 1911 he coined the term "land of mystery and enchantment" although there was nothing in the Mabinogion or in any other Welsh documents to support that designation.  He was wrong about the density of monuments too........  but let that pass for a moment.  Then along came HH Thomas, who in 1923 distorted the geological and geomorphological evidence and managed to convince himself and the world that the glacial transport of the bluestones would have been impossible.  So he invented the human transport myth, and argued that the bluestones (as they were later called) were chosen for transport to Stonehenge because of their prominence as tors and upstanding crags in the landscape of Neolithic Pembrokeshire.  So the idea of reverence and a "sacred landscape" appeared in his work.   He speculated that Preseli must have been the home of a deeply revered and long-established stone cult in which certain stones were venerated and considered irreplaceable.  This theme, concentrated later on into "the sanctity of spotted dolerite", was developed further by Richard Atkinson (who argued for a great and heroic national effort of bluestone transport) and then by Geoffrey Wainwright and Tim Darvill, who brought in the idea of the magical or healing nature of the rock.  By the time Mike Parker Pearson and his colleagues appeared on the scene, it was already established in archaeological circles and it was widely accepted -- on the basis of zero evidence -- that spotted dolerite and other Preseli rocks as well were special if not sacred, and that they came from a sacred landscape.

By this time, as the reader will appreciate, we are well into circular reasoning territory.  Not that that has ever worried the archaeological establishment.  So the bluestones (especially the spotted ones) were sacred because they came from Preseli, which was a place greatly revered.  So they were quarried and taken to Stonehenge because they had inestimable value as sacred objects.  Because they were used at Stonehenge they became sacred, even if they were not sacred already, and that demonstrated that Mynydd Preseli must have been a very sacred place.  Round and round.  Onward and upward, to the heights of absurdity, as represented in the wildly convoluted bluestone narrative currently promoted by Parker Pearson, Ixer, Bevins and assorted others......

Just as the term "bluestone" has no geological meaning or value, the word "Preselite" is an invented term which has probably caused more trouble than enlightenment.  It was invented in 1936 by Alexander Keiller who was working hard to establish a centralized and systematic framework for the study of British prehistoric stone tools.  Ironically, the two stone axes from County Antrim which Keiller labelled as being "Preselite" from the spotted dolerite outcrops of Mynydd Preseli turned out later to be unspotted dolerite, possibly not from Preseli at all.  Similarly, other axes initially labelled as belonging to the Preselite group XIII have turned out not to belong to it at all.

But the geologists and archaeologists know that by calling a rock Preselite" they imply that it is  an exotic, rare mineral—providing the perfect, stylized vocabulary which has allowed promoters like Atkinson, Wainwright, and Darvill to build their romanticized "magic talisman" narratives.

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To conclude, we already know that in West Wales the terms bluestone, spotted dolerite and Preselite have no value whatsoever, since there is nothing in the archaeological record to show that any of the rock types found in the Stonehenge erratic assemblage were revered in any way.  They were not preferentially used either in megalithic structures or in the manufacture of axes or other implements.  They were not deemed special or valuable -- and this removes any rationale for them to have been targetted, quarried, removed and used by our prehistoric ancestors.

Now the same can be said of Stonehenge, which was clearly used as a stone quarry in late Neolithic and early Bronze age times.  The axes that were made at Stonehenge and maybe also in Pembrokeshire were rough disposable tools made from rock types which were not easy to work with.  If spotted dolerite and rhyolite (for example) had been venerated or highly prized, they would have been used for the production of highy polished and stylised ceremonial or ritual objects.  And these would by now have been found in burial and other contexts.

Axe studies, which should be underpinning the fantastical narrative of Parker Pearson and others, show us that it is not really worth a moment of anybody's time.  The tragedy is that this has been said before, by Kellaway, Briggs, Williams-Thorpe and others -- who have been steadfastly ignored by an academic and commercial establishment which has been blindly indifferent to the facts of the matter.

Conclusion:  spotted dolerite has NEVER been considered special or sacred, either in Pembrokeshire, at Stonehenge, or anywhere else.

West Angle Quaternary exposures

 

This is a nice oblique aerial photo of West Angle Bay, taken fairly recently by a drone camera.  The rocky embayments in the middle and left foreground hold a number of exposures of  Late Devensian (LGM) till and periglacial deposits.  The main bay, right of centre, holds one of the most important Quaternary sequences in Wales.  Between the sandy beach and the big caravan park there used to be a brick pit -- now largely destroyed, partly infilled with rubble.  On the seaward edge of this brick pit there was a wonderful exposure of Quaternary sediments, including last Interglacial (Eemian / Ipswichian) silts, clays and peaty beds, and a sequence of glaciasl and periglacial sediments related to the LGM ice advance across western Pembrokeshire.

We get a nice impression from this photo of the quiet estuarine environment that must have existed in this embayment and through valley during the last interglacial.

I have multiple posts about this site, concentrating on the controversy of the Pre-Ipswichian glacial deposit.  DQ Bowen and others claim to have seen it, and so the site has been used by BGS as a "type locality" for the Penfro Till formation.  This is a huge mistake, perpetrated to this day in the literature.  Dave Unwin and I are the only two people to have excavated this site properly, and we found no trace of any till beneath the raised beach.  Other casual observers at this site have failed to recognize the extent to which glacial tectonics have redistributed slabs of sediment. Bits and pieces of peat beds and interglacial sediments have been detasched and thrust over parts of the Devensian glacial sequence, in effect inverting the key layers.  See my posts for further information:

https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1228690739485734684/1824604806378202597

Carn Meini / Carn Menyn -- where some of the bluestones might have come from

 

I've been doing a few water colours recently, and this one is an impression of Carn Meini, seen from near the Waldo Williams memorial stone.  The skyline arrangement of crags is rather impressive -- and of course this " dominance" of the landscape was one of the reasons why Herbert Thomas, Atkinson and more recently Darvill and Wainwright argued that Carn Meini must have been s "special place" for our ancestors -- and therefore worthy of providing "special stones" destined for Stonehenge.

That theory took a bit of a knock when Bevins and Ixer suggested that none of the spotted dolerites at Stonehenge came from here -- their location of preference was Carn Goedog, on the northern flank of the upland ridge.  I'm not sure that a Carn Meini source for some rock fragments has been entirely ruled out, since there are great petrological variations within the many Carn Meini outcrops.  And of course Darvill and Wainwright persisted with their belief that this site was more important to the Neolithic tribesmen than Carn Goedog......... no matter what the geologists might have said in their papers.......

Preseli roches moutonnees.......

 

Thanks to Hugh 360 for this photo, showing very beautifully the very large roche moutonnees that dominate the northern flank of Mynydd Preseli.  On the mountainside here we can see Carn Alw, Foel Drygarn, and Carn Goedog.  This is a clear indication of ice flow from the north -- probably during the course of several glaciations.  I think the capacity for the creation of large-scale erosional features was rather limited during the Devensian -- so probably we are looking at the results of more prolonged ice inundation during the Wolstonian and Aglian glacial episodes.

The Preseli landscape change paper scrutinized: another MPP hypothesis bites the dust

This is getting embarrassing.  The framing of the prehistory of Pembrokeshire as "an essential component of the Stonehenge narrative" always was absurd, but now, surely, it has to be consigned to the scrap heap.  Archaeologists working in West Wales always were worried about it, but by and large they have maintained a stoical silence, cowed by the immense power and influence of people like Richard Atkinson, Geoffrey Wainwright and Mike Parker Pearson..........

One after another, the hypotheses of external influence have been dismissed in the peer-reviewed literature.  First, the Craig Rhosyfelin "Stonehenge megalith quarry" flagged up as "the Pompeii of prehistoric stone quarries" and then shown to be just a figment of a fertile imagination.  Then the spotted dolerite "megalith quarry" at Carn Goedog, also flagged up as a massive industrial complex and then shown to be nothing more than a dolerite tor affected by assorted cold climate processes.  Then the magnificent "lost stone" circle at Waun Mawn, given the full treatment as the last piece of the Stonehenge jigsaw puzzle in an appalling TV documentary and then dismissed with disdain by Tim Darvill and many others.  The stone circle never existed.  Now comes the hypothesis of West Wales population decline following the removal of 80 bluestones monoliths from Preseli, via Waun Mawn, to Stonehenge during the late Neolithic.  That too bites the dust following the publication of this new study.

When you use wildly extravagant phraseology like "the IKEA of Neolithic quarries", "the original Stonehenge", "monolith extraction on an industrial scale", "proto-Stonehenge" and "a monument of unification" you are asking for trouble, especially if your evidence is so thin that it does not withstand scrutiny.........

Anyway, back to the new pollen analysis / landscape change paper.  Thanks to Daisy Spencer for sending me the PDF.  It's a real curate's egg of a paper -- excellent in parts (particularly on the data collection and analysis side) and deeply flawed in others.  One of the biggest problems is that it completely ignores one of the greatest duties placed on all researchers -- ie the duty to hear dissenting voices, to acknowledge their existence and expressions in the peer reviewed literature, and to assess what influence they might have on your conclusions.  None of my work in a string of recent papers is cited, although it is 100% relevant to the matter in hand.  There are no citations of Kellaway, Williams-Thorpe, Briggs or Darvill -- which is extraordinary.  

Daisy Eleanor Spencer, Karen Molloy, Mike Parker Pearson, Ralph Fyfe & Aaron Potito (19 Oct 2025): Prehistoric Landscape Change Around the Sources of Stonehenge’s Bluestones in Preseli, Wales, Environmental Archaeology, DOI:10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741

To link to this article: 

https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741

Over and again, assumptions and speculations are portrayed as established facts.  Some examples.

On the first line of the article the landscapes of Preseli are claimed to have been "connected since the Neolithic" to Salisbury Plain.   Have they really?  Not in my book they haven't.......

Then also on page 1:  "up to 80 bluestones were transported from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain."  Speculation, not fact.

P 1:  "Bluestones were erected in the Aubrey Holes and in Bluestonehenge".  Speculation, not fact.

On p 2 there are references to "bluestone quarries", "the transportation of the bluestones" and "the Waun Mawn stone circle."    All speculation.

On p 5:  Reference to "the bluestone sites"........ and on the same page, reference is made to the empty holes used for standing stones at Waun Mawn.  All speculation.

In Table 1 on page 6, Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog are referred to (and elsewhere in the text) as "bluestone quarries."

On p 6 reference is made to a "Middle Neolithic artificial stone platform" -- that's just a figment of somebody's imagination.

On p 16 there is again a reference to "the quarrying of bluestone" -- speculation, not fact.

On p 18 in referring to Waun Mawn the authors talk of the time  "when the stones were first erected at the site."  This is just a dodgy assumption.

On p 20, the authors talk of  "the movement of c 80 bluestones from Preseli c 3000 BC."  It didn't happen, as MPP has himself conceded.

Then the conclusion:  "The pollen data does not support the abandonment of this area when the bluestones were taken to Stonehenge."  For the umpteenth time, they were NOT taken by human beings to Stonehenge.

And so we could go on.  I can excuse the authors for some of this bias, some of the time, since they were at least testing a hypothesis that needed to be stated -- but they have strayed far beyond the hypothesis and have demonstrated a naive acceptance of many very dodgy components of the narrative developed by Parker Pearson over the years.  Why did they not demonstrate a greater critical faculty?  I think we know the answer to that one.........

The fundamental flaw with this paper is that it insists on examining environmental change in West Wales strictly in the contect of a Stonehenge timeline that is assumed to be "correct" or "relevant."  What we see is a classic case of a "monument obsession"—forcing complex, independent regional data into a famous monument's box just to keep a high-profile theory on life support.  Instead of treating the Preseli landscape as an important cultural landscape in its own right, the authors have treated it as a mere supply yard for the Stonehenge builders.  When their own data proves that the local population stayed put and kept farming right through the "Stonehenge migration" window, they still choose to interpret the local story as a minor chapter in the Stonehenge narrative.    This type of framing creates a distorted view of prehistory by implying that nothing of importance happened in Neolithic Wales unless it was dictated by events in Wiltshire.

For 1782, read 3,000 BP

TO SUMMARISE:  Palynological data from the Preseli Hills reveals a narrative of local agricultural continuity, with continuous cereal cultivation and a lack of large-scale abandonment between 3000–2200 BC, contradicting theories of a mass migration to Stonehenge

The local builders were purely pragmatic. The idea that Preseli was a "sacred landscape" uniquely obsessed with bluestone—to the point where they would pack up their entire society and ship their monuments 240 kilometres away to Wiltshire—is an entirely modern invention.  The new palynological and macrofossil data proves that the people of Preseli probably knew nothing whatsoever about Stonehenge.  If there had been a monumental, multi-generational project to dismantle local stone circles, construct massive transport infrastructures, and conduct a mass migration to Salisbury Plain around 3000 BC, it would have left a catastrophic scar in the local environmental record.  Instead, the pollen cores show absolute indifference to the Stonehenge timeline. The local farming families simply carried on clearing small patches of woodland, growing their crops, and grazing their livestock according to their own domestic routines.  The records show a gradual, self-contained ecological evolution rather than a abrupt transformation, with major deforestation not appearing until the Late Bronze Age

As argued by Stephen Briggs, the Neolithic tribes of west Wales were opportunists, utilitarians and pragmatists.  They were also quite sophisticated in that they knew a great deal more about cost / benefit analysis than many modern archaeologists!

So congratulations to Daisy Spencer and her colleagues for killing off another piece of the Parker Pearson narrative.  Thankfully, there is now hardly any of it left.

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. 

Eisteddfod y Garreg Las -- the bluestone eisteddfod

 

On 1st August the Welsh National Eisteddfod -- the biggest annual cultural festival in Wales -- comes to Llantwd near Cardigan.  Over the course of a week or so they expect  180,000 visitors onto the site -- competitors, supporters, families and friends, and expats back home for the occasion.  Almost all of the transactions will be through the medium of Welsh, which is as it should be.

Anyway, the theme this year -- as reflected in the title of the eisteddfod -- is bluestone.  This was decided by the organizing committee many moons ago as something giving the community of NE Pembrokeshire its own special character.  Interestingly, this patch of designated territory is not the same as that given the name "Bluestone Country" in the days when I was a committe member of the Preseli Tourist Association........  Never mind.  If the label helps with the marketing of a worthy event, let's just go with the flow.

The two big poetry competitions -- for the bardic chair and the bardic crown -- do not have bluestone themes.  As ever, the themes are rather abstract.  But we can be sure that bluestones will feature heavily in the entries, and it's a fair bet that one or both of the winners will have written about the bluestones and their significance.  And bluestones will feature strongly in the art and craft competitions too.  So there will be bluestone representations on all sides -- and they will be made of wood, metal, wool and any other materials that can be shaped and coloured blue.  Inevitably, many of the representations will be made to look like spotted dolerite.......

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

So here is my small contribution for the occasion, designed to educate those who may not have kept up with the literature:

THE BLUESTONES

Brian John

Once upon a time our heroic ancestors quarried 80 large monoliths of special stone from a sacred place in Preseli and transported them to Stonehenge, to be used in one of the megalithic wonders of the world. That's the story that we all know and love. But is it more than just a story? Is it supported by real historical records or by sound scientific evidence?  Sadly, the answer to both questions is "No"........

First, the term "bluestone" -- which has no geological meaning. The term has been used for a century or so to describe an assortment of more than 30 different non-sarsen rock types found at Stonehenge, in standing stones, fallen stones, buried stumps and small fragments in the soil. Most, but not all, of the rock types (including several types of spotted dolerite, volcanic lava and ash) are found in Mynydd Preseli. Most of the bluestones are not even blue. In ancient history there is no evidence at all that any of these rock types were considered special or sacred -- local cromlechs and other stone setting were always made of whatever handy stones happened to be lying around in the vicinity. At Stonehenge the majority of the known 43 bluestone monoliths look like (and probably are) battered and far-travelled glacial erratics.

And was Mynydd Preseli a sacred place, revered by the Stone Age inhabitants of West Wales? Apparently not. The label "land of mystery and enchantment" is a modern invention, by Rev Done Bushell around 1911. He mistakenly believed that the area on the south flank of Preseli had a greater density of sacred structures than any other part of West Wales, and he also referred to the area as "a prehistoric Westminster". Picturesque but unreliable. In the Mabinogion there is no mention of Preseli as being a special or magical place, and in his fantastical writings about King Arthur, Geoffrey of Monmouth did not differentiate between the sarsens and bluestones at Stonehenge, and suggested that the monument had been magically transported from Ireland, not Wales.

The story of the human transport of the bluestones was invented by geologists Herbert Thomas around 1920, at a time when the nation was recovering from the traumas of the First World War. There was a need for a "feel good" story that emphasised the high civilisation and technical skills of our heroic ancestors, and Thomas obliged, ignoring the opinions of his fellow geologists who believed that the bluestones had been transported by glacier ice. People loved the story, and it was immediately picked up by archaeologists and built into the educational and marketing strategy for Stonehenge.

Then, ironically, the story was weaponised immediately after the Second Worl War during the "Battle of Preseli", when the local community took on the War Office which wanted to enclose the greater part of Mynydd Preseli as a military training and firing range. It was argued -- tactically -- by influential politicians and religious leaders that Preseli was one of the great sacred cradles of Welsh culture, and that it would be not only disrespectful but actually sacriligious to turn the wild moorlands into a place devoted to warfare. The Stonehenge bluestone link was incorporated into the argument. As explained by historian Hefin Wyn, the government backed off, and the battle was won.  In retrospect, the designation of Preseli as a historic mystical and holy place was nonsense, but all is fair in love and war!

In 1952 the uplands were designated as part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park and saved for the nation and for future generations. Mynydd Preseli is still a wild and wonderful place loved by many thousands of people for its wide horizons and quiet beauty.  In that sense, as demonstrated by Waldo Williams in his poem "Preseli", this is truly a special place. The bluestones, in their infinite variety, are still there, exposed in rocky tors like Carn Meini and Carn Alw.

But let's not fool ourselves. The elaborate and fanciful narrative developed by archaeologists and geologists in recent years does not have its roots in prehistory; it is a modern myth, created only about a hundred years ago, unsupported by modern science, and now promoted largely for commercial reasons.


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

The Stonehenge bluestones and our heroic ancestors: time to stop flogging the dead horse

OK -- the time has come for the Stonehenge establishment, and a vast array of academics from assorted disciplines, to stop this seemingly endless search for evidence in support of a wild fantasy invented by HH Thomas in 1923.  Before 1923, most experts accepted that the stone monument at Stonehenge was built of an assortment of stones, some large and others smaller,  some local and others from far away, that happened to be lying around in the landscape.  Geologists argued that some of the stones had come from the west, and that they had probably been transported by glacier ice.  For a variety of reasons already enumerated on this blog, Thomas wanted a much more complex and heroic narrative, and he falsified the known evidence of glacial activity in the Bristol Channel in order to support his story of long-distance bluestone transport by humans as "the only reliable alternative".  That became, in no time at all, the ruling hypothesis, and for a century academics from many different disciplines have desperately been trying to confirm it.  Without success.  There is still not a shred of hard evidence to show that there was any link between Stonehenge and Preseli, apart from a few small traded objects such as those that might link any two small parts of a large island........

After an investment of thousands of hours of research time and the expenditure of many millions of pounds of taxpayers money, it's time for academics to get real and for the research funding organizations to stop throwing good money after bad.

Just a reminder of where we are.  There are no strong cultural links between West Wales and Stonehenge; as demonstrated by Wainwright and Darvill, the megalithic structures demonstrate instead a strong link between West Wales, North Wales and Ireland.  There is no evidence that bluestones were revered or used preferentially in West Wales in monument construction.  There is no evidence of strong trading links or social connections between Stonehenge and Preseli.  Although we now know approximately where many of the bluestones at Stonehenge might have come from, the claims made by Bevins and Ixer about precise "spot provenencing" are unacceptable and unreliable.  There are no bluestone monolith  quarries at Rhosyfelin, Carn Goedog or anywhere else, and it is in any case bizarre to think in terms of quarrying activity or even "extraction points" for all of the many bluestone types represented at Stonehenge.     (The only bluestone quarry known to the author is near the summit of Foel Drygarn, where small slabs were collected for use in burial mounds and defensive structures, starting in the Bronze Age.  )

There is no evidence of haulage routes, trackways, ropes, sledges, rafts or boats that might have been used   in a multi-generational stonen haulage operation.  The idea promoted by Parker Pearson of a "lost stone circle" at Waun Mawn which was linked to Stonehenge has been systematically dismantled by many reviewers, and is now quite rightly abandoned.

Finally, in one last desperate attempt to demonstrate that the sequence of land use, landscape change and settlement in Preseli was somehow linked to a Stonehenge chronology,  Parker Pearson and co-workers in a new article have demonstrated instead that the people of the far west had not the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, what was going on over on Salisbury Plain:     

Spencer, D. E., Molloy, K., Pearson, M. P., Fyfe, R., & Potito, A. (2025). Prehistoric Landscape Change Around the Sources of Stonehenge’s Bluestones in Preseli, Wales. Environmental Archaeology, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741

Isotope work, pollen analyses, radiocarbon dates and other indicators of  environmental change and cultural linkages have also failed to turn up anything that might help to confirm the ruling hypothesis, whatever claims there may have been to the contrary.

As suggested by Stephen Briggs many moons ago, the prehistoric tribal groups of West Wales were opportunists and pragmatists who quietly got on with life,  no doubt with trading contacts in all compass directions but blissfully unaware of the existence of Stonehenge and other monuments which were far, far away over distant horizons.  The locations of megalithic monuments were determined above all else by the availability of stone resources -- in rock outcrops, scree accumulations, blockfields and glacial erratic scatters.   And as suggested by Barclay and Brophy, the network of contacts was essentially local, determined above all else by local geography and resource distribution and with occasional forays further afield -- with no sign at all of  centralised organization or political power exerted from Wessex, Salisbury Plain or Stonehenge.  Parker Pearson's fantasies on this front just do not withstand scrutiny.

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2023/01/deterministic-and-opportunistic-stone.html

The truth is a foreign country.  A somewhat imaginative AI image published by RJL on his blog.........

Prehistoric Landscape change around Preseli. New paper shows nothing new.

I'm not able to get at this because it is behind a paywall, but I'm not losing any sleep over it, because it clearly shows that Preseli was not abandoned or depopulated at all, following the presumed export of the bluestones.  It was a daft idea anyway -- one of a host of daft ideas promoted by our oild friend MPP over the years.  The "pastoral indicators" indicated for the Early and Middle Neolithic were perfectly predictable and clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with Stonehenge or the bluestones, and it would be flying in the face of common sense to pretend otherwise.

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

Prehistoric Landscape Change Around the Sources of Stonehenge’s Bluestones in Preseli, Wales

Daisy Eleanor Spencer, Karen Molloy, Mike Parker Pearson, Ralph Fyfe & Aaron Potito.
Environmental Archaeology 2025, Received 29 Apr 2025, Accepted 09 Oct 2025, Published online: 19 Oct 2025

https://doi.org/10.1080/14614103.2025.2574741

ABSTRACT

This palaeoenvironmental investigation into prehistoric landscape change was set in the Preseli region of Pembrokeshire, west Wales from where Stonehenge’s bluestones originate. It aimed to investigate whether the movement of bluestones to Stonehenge, considered to have formed Stonehenge’s first stage c. 3000 BC, was accompanied by an out-migration of people, leaving the Preseli region largely uninhabited in succeeding centuries until c. 2200 BC. Potentially, this might be reflected in the palaeoecological record by a reduction in anthropogenic land-use indicators. Detailed analyses that involved pollen, macrofossil, non-pollen palynomorph (NPP), loss-on-ignition (LOI550) and stratigraphical investigations of multipleö core sequences from heathland on the slopes of the Preseli Hills, in combination with archaeological spot samples from five prehistoric sites in the locality, were undertaken. This multi-core and multi-site approach has allowed for an interpretation of local environmental change from the Early Holocene to the Late Bronze Age. An insight into human population dynamics has been gained in an area where palaeoecological investigations have traditionally been hampered by a lack of deep peat sequences. The Mesolithic and Neolithic were largely dominated by woodland species while increases in pastoral indicators began during the Early – Middle Neolithic contemporary with activity at important bluestone sites. Significant expansion of pastoral and arable farming did not occur until the Late Bronze Age. However, despite a scarcity of archaeological remains from c. 3000–2200 BC, the presence of cereal pollen during this interval hints at a continued human presence in the landscape after the transportation of the bluestones.

The glacial transport of the bluestones: the glorious irrationality of the Stonehenge establishment

The "traditional" map of known ice movement directions as it was around 1900.  In several sectors subsequent research has shown a more extensive ice cover.  HH Thomas must have known this map, but chose to misrepresent it.  The evidence base for ice movements on the western flank of Great Britain has always been stronger than the evidence base for the east coast.

As far as I can see, the latest suggestion relating to the glacial transport of the Altar Stone from northern Scotland to the Dogger Bank has been broadly accepted by the Stonehenge archaeology establishment.  At least, nobody has come out in opposition to the idea, although there have been a few murmurs about the rather fanciful Dogger Bank / Dogger Island part of the narrative.

Clarke, A. J. I., Veness, R. L. J., Kirkland, C. L., Clark, C. D., Gandy, N., Emery, A. et al. (2026) From Highlands to Henge: Refining the Provenance and Transport Pathways of Stonehenge's Altar Stone. Journal of Quaternary Science, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.70080

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jqs.70080

So we now have a "hybrid theory" for the east coast of Great Britain, with the acceptance of the idea that the Altar Stone may well be a large glacial erratic, transported on at least part of its journey by south-flowing glacier ice.  There are no other known ORS monoliths on Salisbury Plain that can be matched to the Altar Stone, and there is no known erratic trail from A to B.  As noted by Clarke et al, it might be there, but if it is there it is very conveniently situated on the floor of the North Sea.......... out of sight and out of mind. So the speculation cannot be contradicted by hard evidence.

Now we come to the entertaining bit.  Over the course of more than a century geologists like Judd, Kellaway and Williams-Thorpe have argued that something similar happened on the west coast of Great Britain, with the Irish Sea Ice Stream transporting a wide array of glacial erratics from sources along its known route and dumping some of them on the floor of the Bristol Channel and others above present sea level on the coasts of South Wales, Devon,  Cornwall and Somerset. Ice movement directions are well known, and erratic provenances are broadly agreed by the experts. The evidence is well described in the literature, and is undisputed by glacial geomorphologists.  

But it is bizarre,  to put it mildly, that archaeologists -- and especially those who are influential in Stonehenge circles -- insist that the glacial transport of the bluestones was impossible, basing that outrageous belief on a very dodgy statement by HH Thomas back in 1923 that the ice of the Irish Sea Glacier could not have extended much further than the coast of South Pembrokeshire.  He invented the human transport hypothesis, and a large part of the academic establishment and the Stonehenge media machine has promoted that as "the truth" ever since.

On the basis of Thomas's dishonesty the human transport of the bluestones has been ruthlessly promoted as "the only story that makes sense", with MPP and his colleagues developing an ever more complex and fanciful narrative (involving quarries, lost stone circles etc) and with the backing of geologists like Bevins and Ixer, who should be ashamed of themselves.  The bandwaggon has also made room for one or two geomorphologists, who shall be nameless.

So the glacial transport of large lumps of rock is OK off the east coast, but not off the west coast.  This is hilarious, pathetic, outrageous and reprehensible in equal measure.

The only story that respects the evidence and makes sense is the hybrid one, involving glacial erosion, entrainment and erratic transport as part one of the bluestone monolith journey, and then human transport for the last part of the journey from several locations yet to be discovered, through to Stonehenge.  Those locations WILL be found, and that is where future research should be concentrated.

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

Quote from one of my earlier posts:
All things considered, the accumulated evidence shows that by 1910 the broad outlines of glaciation in the Bristol Channel / Celtic Sea arena were already established, involving thick and active ice carrying erratics and other glacial materials from the NW across Pembrokeshire and up the Bristol Channel, affecting the coasts of South Wales and the South-West Peninsula. In making his claims about the impossibility of bluestone transport towards Stonehenge HH Thomas wilfully ignored a great amount of evidence in the printed literature, and wilfully misrepresented the opinions of senior "glacialists". It is quite extraordinary that he got away with it -- but that, maybe, was because he was a geologist talking to archaeologists or antiquarians. If he had been a geologist talking to other geologists, he would certainly not have got away with it. They would have had his guts for garters.

Shoreline ice accumulations in the Nares Strait

 

These slides are from the film "Beneath the Polar Sun" -- relating an attempt about ten years ago by a group of experienced kayakers to navigate the full length of the Nares Strait between North Greenland and Axel Heiberg Island.  They expected to find flat ice floes and intersecting navigable leads of clear water;  what they found was a nighmare of smashed ice fragments and brash ice stretching from horizon to horizon, with huge pressure ridges on long stretches of the shoreline.  They expected to travel 300 km. but gave up after 30 km of unremitting toil.

Ever since David Sugden and I wrote our extended report called "Coastal Geomorphology of High Latitudes" many years ago, I have been intrigued by the physical variations that exist in the real world of marine limits and raised shorelines.  There is quite enough variation is it is, on coasts where processes are determined by relatively ice-free conditions -- but things get vastly more complex where brash ice fragments or bergy bits are stranded on the shore.

Where an ice foot (or fringe of landfast sea ice) exists, there is considerable variation, partly dependent on the amount of brash ice or bergy bits incorporated -- derived from glaciers and icebergs.  And there is more variation again in freshwater environments like the shores of the Great Lakes, where much frazil ice may be incorporated, and where spectacular spring floods occur, such as in the St Lawrence and Mackenzie Rivers when the winter ice is flushed out with dramatic and sometimes catastrophic consequences.  Similar catastrophic spring floods also occur in the lower parts of the great  north-flowing Siberian rivers -- the Yenisei, Lena and Ob.  

In Antarctic raised beaches we often see pits and ridges on the pebble banks, with rapid lateral variations in beach sediments including particle size.  Bulldozed or pushed ridges of beach material are evidence of vast ice pressure on the shoreline associated with tidal streams or onshore winds;  accumulations of brash ice and pack ice fragments may be piled up to heights of 20m above HWM, forming more or less impenetrable barriers to access and causing damage to coastal infrastructure.  

One of our biggest fears when paddling om Nordvestfjord in 1962 was that an onshore wind might push all of the floating ice fragments in the fjord tight up against the shoreline, trapping us either inside or ourside the barrier.  Being trappped on the inside was preferable, but not to be welcomed.  But being trapped on the outside of a brash ice barrier was potentially lethal, since our canvas kayaks could not have coped with any attempt to paddle though it, and and neither could we have walked across it to the shore..........

The strange case of the missing Bulford post holes.......

Andy's attempts to fit assorted known pits at Bulford to a summer solstice line 

I refer to  a Facebook post by Andy Burnham (no, not that one --the other one) based on one of his Magalithic Portal posts.  Reprinted below with acknowledgement.

 I think it's fair to say that there is growing disquiet about the "summer solstice" post holes which Phil Harding claims to have found at Bulford in a dig that was completed almost a decade ago.  All very mysterious.  Andy is careful not to suggest, even very obliquely,  that the post holes do not exist, or that Phil has simply invented them, but it's very strange that nobody noticed, at the time of the dig or at the time of the Matt Lievers report in 2021, that there were two holes bigger and  different from all the others in their characteristics and which happened to lie on the (approximate) solar solstice alignment.......

Anjd why the emphasis on the exact 120m spacing? Is Phil suggesting that our clever ancestors were faliliar with the metric system of measurement?

It's too late now for anybody to go and check the evidence (which has in any case not been published) because there is now a housing estate on the site........

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

A fascinating midsummer solstice story as you no doubt saw - never has more excitement been generated over some Neolithic pits due to the Stonehenge connection and the careful 'silly season' timing. A deeper dive into what we know so far. Wessex Archaeology announced...

 1.  an alignment of two timber posts at Bulford, 120m apart, pointed to midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset ~2950 BCE - a "prototype" solstice marker 500 years before the Stonehenge one. In the absence of the full publication I had a look at what's out there on the record. 

2.   This isn't a new dig. The Bulford pits were excavated in 2015-17 and published by Matt Leivers in 2021 (Internet Archaeology 56, free to read and very interesting). Linked at the end of this thread. The recent announcement seems to be a fresh reading of these same features.

 3.  Much was already in that paper: 48 pits on the hilltop dated ~2950 BCE, feasting debris and scatter leaning east towards Sidbury Hill. The solar interest was already on record. Even the star find. The "rare disc-shaped knife" now presented as a possible image of the sun's disc which is very easy to be sceptical about! - listed simply as "a discoidal knife" among the pit finds.

4.   But here's the gap. The structure actually being announced - two posts, 120m apart, on the solstice line - isn't described in the 2021 paper at all. 

5.  The post features Leivers does describe at Bulford don't match it: they're several centuries later (~2470-2570 BCE, not 2950) and much closer together (the nearest large pair about 64m apart, not 120m). Presumably there is now earlier dating for the two large 'alignment' pits

 6.  What is rather odd is how those two large pits were missed - Phil Harding spotted them from the unpublished work. 

7.  I tried to find the two posts on the published plan. I can't. (See the original post).  Every pit is shown as the same small dot, with 48 packed onto one hilltop. I plotted some 120m lines on the 50 degree solstice bearing - you can align this through dozens of pit pairs by chance... 

8.  So there's no picking the proposed aligned pair off the plan - far too many fit, and we're deliberately not proposing one. The actual two posts must have been singled out in the dig as large, deep post-holes, and that evidence just isn't on the published figure. 

9.  None of which makes it wrong of course - the setting is real, the date is real, the solstice bearing checks out. It's plausible and a comfortable fit with what's known - it's just running ahead of the published evidence presumably for the sake of that solstice announcement.

 10.  And fair play to them for getting the excitement in early - the detail is promised in a forthcoming Army Basing Programme volume (free via Wessex Archaeology's Open Library) and a Prehistoric Society piece. Until then it can't really be checked.

 11.  We await the publication with great interest. More on our new page for the the Bulford Neolithic Pits and Alignment which shows what must be the location for the alignment https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=63957 

12.  The location of the pits and alignment is close to the very nicely reconstructed henges which you can visit here: https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=60365 

13.   There's more in my forum post on the current gaps in the interpretation: https://www.megalithic.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=Forum&file=viewtopic&topic=10434&forum=4  

14.  Here is the very interesting 2021 paper our pages were all based on, from Matt Leivers, which also discusses potential alignments on the Stonehenge cursus:  Stonehenge and the Emergence of the Sacred Landscape of Wessex Internet Archaeology 56. 

https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue56/2/index.html 

Why the regional marine limit (highest shoreline) is difficult to find

 

I came across this fabulous oblique aerial shot the other day, of part of the coast of Svalvbard.  I have labelled some of the features.

In the early days of our careers, David Sugden and I became quite good at finding the regional marine limit as we hoofed around in the landscape.  We discovered one marine limit at 134m in Kjove Land, East Greenland, in 1962, and then another one at the staggering  altitude of 275m at Noel Hill in the South Shetland Islands in Antarctica in 1966.  The altitudes were fixed with the most primitive surveying instruments coupled with barometric checks.  There were no detailed maps, and no GPS instruments in those far-off days.......

In the period since we did our fieldwork, as far as we know nobody has found higher marine traces in our fieldwork areas, or corrected our altitudes.

The marine limit in a glaciated landscape subject to isostatic adjustment or tectonic uplift is notoriously difficult to find.  The reason is explained in the photo above.  At the end of a glacial episode, as ice wastage speeds up and as isostatic uplift kicks in, very little of the coastline is initially subject to wave attack and other coastal processes.  That is becaused of the protection afforded to the coastline by a band of landfast perennial sea ice -- sometimes called the "ice foot".  It's very clear in the photo.  In the deepest valleys or fjords, flowing glaciers with floating snouts effectively protect coastal solid rock outcrops, and in other embayments seasonal sea ice may also afford protection.  We can see this situation at the left edge of the photo.

In the photo only one small coastal stretch is in contact with the open sea -- and this is where a range of coastal processes can operate -- just for a short time if isostatic or tectonic uplift rates are high.  So on the ground today we may find washed surfaces, small pebble banks or simply till deposits from which some of the finer sediments have been removed by wave action.  I recall many intense discussions with Dave while we tried to piece together the clues!  And because of the relatively great age of these high beach remnants, they have of course also been modified by post-glacial slope processes and frost shattering.

In the case of the South Shetland Islands, there was reasonable evidence of a short-lived ice advance over the marine shoreline traces.  It was clearly not very powerful, since the traces were well preserved.  Some have suggested that the "residual raised beach" that we described may be Plio-Pleistocene in age;  I disagree with that, since the remnants are so close to an ice edge that they cannot possibly have survived for that long, during multiple expansions and contractions of the  King George Island ice cap or indeed the regional ice sheet cover.  On the other hand, away from the areas of distinct ice streaming, island ice caps can expand to cover pereviously ice-free areas and can actually protect them.  So, on balance, in my 1971 paper I suggested that the Noel Hill resudual beach may well date from the last interglacial......... Eemian or Ipswichian.

Thus far, nobody, as far as I know, has managed to date these "high level" raised marine features which David and I described in our big paper in 1971........

See also:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-noel-hill-residual-raised-beach.html

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-myth-of-ice-rafted-coastal-erratics.html