3rd April: Stonehenge Thoughts
Since seeing Stonehenge “close-up” I’ve been thinking about the transport of the so called “bluestones” from West Wales to Salisbury Plain. This is a summary of my conclusions; there is more detailed discussion and references to the journal papers and books in my other posts with links below.
Swallow Boats very own “neolithic” model!
Transport by Sea: I’m not an archaeologist, but I do have marine experience. As soon as I saw the coastal route proposed by Atkinson and still reproduced by English Heritage and others I thought it ridiculous. Faced with transporting 2 ton rocks you would not hug the coast. It is by far the most dangerous place to be.
The people who re-enact the process using boats like “Holgar” miss the point. It is not whether you can build a boat that floats with a rock in it. The problem is whether you can create a viable passage plan for the journey.
Passage plans include what to do when things go wrong. Lacking harbours in neolithic times, the best option would to land on a beach through surf. You would not want to do that accompanied by a 2 ton rock. So you would put the rock on a raft (easier than putting it in a boat – nowadays people transport heavy loads using flat barges for the same reason) and you would tow the raft using two or three canoes. But that would only have been possible if long ropes for tow-lines were available, you can’t do it otherwise.
But the tidal currents in the area you need to traverse are similar in magnitude to the speeds you can achieve when towing a raft, the latter are defined by physics. So you have to get the tides right. And you do not possess extended weather forecasts for the likely period of the voyage. Faced with the prospect of transporting more than 40 stones… forget it, better to go by land!
Transport by land: As an estimate, to go from Stonehenge to the Preseli mountains and come back with a 2 ton rock would take about 3 months. To bring back 40 stones in one expedition is not possible, it is going to take a good many years. You can create hypothetical reasons for doing it based on religion, and people perform unlikely tasks when driven by religion.
But a recently rebroadcast BBC programme was not convincing. The bluestones do not look like they were quarried from a rock outcrop in west Wales, they appear like a collection of glacial erratics. If going to all that effort, why bring back an assortment of rocks, some of which are not the best for building a monument, when more suitable stones are available all around you in the Preseli hills? And if the reason is that you are transporting stones from an older, venerated stone circle, why did someone use unsuitable rocks to build the stone circle in the first place?
Transport by Ice: by far the simplest explanation is that the bluestones were a train of glacial erratics dumped on Salisbury Plain by ice. Simple explanations are good. It also fits with the observation that stone circles were usually built where stones were readily available. Indeed, if monuments were always built using local stone, then the use of rocks from Wales at Stonehenge might be considered circumstantial evidence that the ice reached Salisbury Plain.
Neolithic people would have been experts on stone and the “bluestones” would have been recognised as different from any local rock, special, even magical maybe? If only there were more evidence that ice really did reach Salisbury Plain during Ice Age times. That does not mean that it did not, but there does not seem to be proof that it did.
However there is some evidence, that the ice reached the southern edge of the Bristol Channel and probably some distance beyond. At Stanton Drew, near the Bristol Channel, there is a monument which has striking similarities to Woodhenge, near Stonehenge. While the use of the bluestones at Stonehenge probably predates these monuments by a significant period, they emphasise a later, shared culture between the two sites. You could walk from Stonehenge to Stanton Drew in a couple of days, bringing a 2 ton rock back might take 2 or 3 weeks. The logistics are far simpler than bringing rocks from west Wales.
Finally… Source of the Sarsens: I’m not convinced that recent papers have shown that the sarsens definitely came from the West Woods area, the match of rock types in the published paper is not that definitive. In any case, I’m not sure how you can prove that they did not come from the area around Stonehenge, now depleted of sarsens due to their use in building the monument!
Conclusion: People bringing large stones all the way from west Wales to Salisbury Plain is a good selling point if you want to attract visitors to Stonehenge, or perhaps to get a TV station to finance an archaeological dig. Transport by ice, at least to the area south of the Bristol Channel and maybe all the way, is a less romantic but much more likely explanation!
None of these thoughts are particularly new. For example read the book by Brian John who strongly advocates transport by ice!