Secondhand Stonehenge? Welsh origins of a Wiltshire monument

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 311

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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?

While the bluestones’ layout has puzzled archaeologists since Hawley’s time, moreover, their purpose has proven equally enigmatic. Some of the stones have tenons, mortises, tongues, and grooves – were they originally intended to fit together? Might they in fact have been reused from an earlier monument? And if so, where did the stones originally stand? The answers, it is becoming increasingly clear, lie in Wales.

Welsh origins

Although a Pembrokeshire origin for the bluestones was first proposed almost a century ago, only recently have geologists Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer definitively pinned down three areas on and around the Preseli hills where they were quarried (see p.23). To-date, in a joint undertaking with fellow project directors Josh Pollard, Colin Richards, Duncan Schlee, and Kate Welham, we have excavated two of these, at Craig Rhos-y-Felin (where the rhyolites come from) and Carn Goedog (spotted dolerite, the material that most of the bluestones are formed of).