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