A casual visitor to Stonehenge might be forgiven for not paying too much attention to the monument’s ‘bluestones’, the smaller uprights that form a horseshoe, and another incomplete circle, at the monument’s heart. Standing less than 3m tall, they are dwarfed by the more striking ‘sarsens’, the massive dressed and lintel-crowned sandstone monoliths that Stonehenge is famous for – but these unassuming stones have a fascinating story to tell about the site’s origins.
Around 43 bluestones survive today, but empty sockets for other bluestones hint at there once being many more, perhaps as many as 80. Nor might their present layout be their original formation: Richard Atkinson, whose excavations in the 1950s revealed so much about Stonehenge – including the presence of Bronze Age rock art etched into some of the stones (CA 273) – suggested the bluestones may have previously occupied the ‘Q’ and ‘R holes’, a series of depressions that form a circle or arc between the five sarsen trilithons and outer circle, and were only later moved to their present arrangement. But while the Q and R holes have been recently dated to c.2500 BC, it is thought that the bluestones may have arrived on Salisbury Plain even earlier.
Tantalising clues come from the Aubrey Holes, a set of 56 pits that surround Stonehenge in a large circle. William Hawley’s records of his investigations of these features in the 1920s reveal that he had little doubt that they ‘once held upright stones’, and indeed, when we excavated one of the pits during the Stonehenge Riverside Project in 2008 (CA 270), we were able to confirm that it had contained a standing stone. Might the Aubrey Holes, which date from c.2900 BC, represent the original setting of the bluestones at this earliest phase of Stonehenge, when the site began life as a cremation cemetery encircled by a ditch and bank?
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