Tracing the route of the Sarsens to Stonehenge - The video

In the Footsteps of the Ancestors | Stonehenge Access All Areas Ep 3 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahmkk--9Hq4 via @YouTube

Two Boulders Fewer: North Devon’s Erratics Now Point to Ice Rafting, Not Override

How the re-reading of the Shebbear stone and the Ramson Cliff boulder removes the high-level evidence for Irish Sea ice on the North Devon cliffs — and what is left standing once they are gone.

The Shebbear Sarsen

The Ramson Cliff Erratic

For the better part of two centuries the erratic boulders of the North Devon coast have been read as evidence that ice once reached, and in places rode over, this shore. Two stones carried more of that argument than the rest: the Devil’s Stone at Shebbear, and the block at Ramson Cliff on Baggy Point, sitting at about 80 m above Ordnance Datum. Both have now been looked at again. Neither survives the examination as a far-travelled glacial erratic. With them set aside, the North Devon record is a good deal more uniform than the textbooks allow, and the explanation that fits it best is not an overriding ice sheet but ice rafting onto a shore platform standing under a high relative sea level.

How we got here

The story begins in 1837, with the first report of a large non-local boulder at the foot of the Saunton cliffs. It belongs to a wider Victorian preoccupation. When the Boulder Committees were set up — the Scottish committee in 1871, the British Association committee reporting annually from 1873 to 1914 — the question they were chartered to settle was precisely ours: were the erratics of Britain and Ireland dropped from floating ice, or dragged by grounded glaciers? By the end of the century the answer for the country at large had gone to grounded ice, and that has remained the default reading of an erratic ever since.

The South West was always the awkward exception. The early catalogues — Prestwich (1892), Worth (1898), Ussher (1904), Reid and Scrivenor (1906), Reid (1907), and for North Devon’s igneous material Dewey (1910) — described foreign blocks strung along coasts and dredged from the sea floor, including the boulders Hunt recovered from the Salcombe fishing grounds well out in the Channel and the Giant’s Rock at Porthleven (Flett and Hill, 1912). A great many of these stones lie south and east of any limit a British or Irish ice sheet has ever been shown to reach. For those, grounded ice is not on the table; floating ice is the only carrier left. Rafting, in other words, is not a hypothesis in the South West but a demonstrated fact — the only open question has been how far its reach extends.

North Devon sat closer to the supposed ice, and so the older argument ran hotter there. Taylor (1956, 1958) catalogued the Saunton and Fremington erratics; the interpretation then split. Mitchell (1960, 1965) and Kidson (1971, 1977; Kidson et al., 1977) read the giant coastal blocks as the work of a regional ice sheet, generally placed in the Anglian or earlier. Stephens (1966, 1970, 1974) read them as rafted, and his positive argument is the one that has worn best: the largest erratics are confined to a narrow coastal band below about 9 m OD, within reach of present storm waves — a strange, selective distribution for an ice sheet that supposedly buried the ground, and exactly what one would expect of stones grounded out of floating ice at a former shoreline.

Into that argument came a wrinkle. Every North Devon erratic on record up to 1969 lay at the base of the cliffs. The block found afterwards on top of Baggy Point, at roughly 80 m OD, was first noted by Madgett & Madgett (1974) and formally described (as part of the full Saunton–Croyde erratic suite) by Madgett & Inglis (1987), did not fit. It became the high-level evidence: the one stone that seemed to require ice standing well above the present coast, riding over the headland rather than lapping its foot. The Devil’s Stone at Shebbear, higher still and inland, was pressed into the same service. Between them they propped up the reading that North Devon had been overrun, not merely fringed, by Irish Sea ice.

The standard synthesis, Campbell et al. (1998) in the Quaternary of South-West England volume of the Geological Conservation Review, left the ice-sheet-versus-rafting question formally open. The Fremington context was filled in by Croot et al. (1996), and the regional ceiling for independent ice was fixed by Evans et al. (2012), who identified the Dartmoor ice cap as the southernmost independent Pleistocene ice cap in the British Isles. Then the marine record tightened the limits hard. The BRITICE–CHRONO programme — Smedley et al. (2017), Scourse et al. (2021), Clark et al. (2022) — showed that the last Irish Sea Ice Stream pushed all the way to the Celtic Sea shelf break, but that its southernmost terrestrial ice stood on the Isles of Scilly at about 25 ka. Scilly is to the west; North Devon lies east of it, tucked into the inner Bristol Channel. And Scourse et al. (2024) supplied the missing mechanism for the low coastal erratics: early in the last cold stage a steep, ice-loaded crust held relative sea level high enough, while calving margins still existed, for ice to raft material onto southern shore platforms during Marine Isotope Stages 4 and 3. For the first time there was a dated, physical route by which the Saunton and Croyde blocks could have arrived where they sit, without an ice sheet ever touching them.

The two boulders, looked at again

The Shebbear stone is the simpler case. Read as a local silcrete — a sarsen, sitting on or close to its parent duricrust — it is not a travelled stone at all. It records the survival of a hard cap, not the passage of ice, and it never had any business in a discussion of transport mechanisms. A boulder that has gone nowhere tells you nothing about how far ice came.

Ramson Cliff is the consequential one, because it was the stone that seemed to demand grounded ice high above the coast. In A review of the Ramson Cliff erratic: evidence of high-level ice flow? (Quaternary Newsletter 167, 2026), Rob Ixer, Paul Madgett — one of those who recorded the block in the first place — and I went back to the original thin section and the archival record. The petrography is fully compatible with the altered greenstones of the Cornubian metamorphic aureole, and carries none of the diagnostic Scottish or Welsh minerals that a far-travelled provenance would require. The block has no documentary existence before 1969: no map, no photograph. It was first noticed standing upright in pasture. It shows none of the abrasion a marine or shore-platform history would leave. And it is the only claimed high-level erratic on the entire south Bristol Channel coast — a population of one, at an anomalous height, pointing nowhere distant.

An angular block of local greenstone, standing upright, unworn, undocumented before living memory, alone at its elevation. On the balance of the evidence that is a manuported stone, not a glacial one; and its value as proof of high-level ice should be reassessed accordingly.

What this changes

Take Shebbear and Ramson Cliff out of the account and a plain fact emerges: there is no longer any demonstrated far-travelled boulder above the coastal zone in North Devon. The genuinely foreign material — the Saunton “pink granite”, the granulite gneiss at Freshwater Gut, and the petrographically interesting coastal clasts such as Taylor’s No. 7 with its apparent Irish Sea affinities — is all low. All of it sits on or about the shore platform and the raised beach, in the narrow band below storm-wave reach.

That is, to the letter, the distribution Stephens flagged half a century ago, now stripped of the high-level counter-examples that always sat awkwardly beside it. It is also exactly what the glacio-isostatic, high-sea-level rafting model of Scourse et al. (2024) predicts. And it leaves nothing on the headlands to require a thick ice sheet riding over them.

The argument therefore reframes. The live alternative to rafting is no longer “grounded ice at 80 m” — that reading has lost the only stones that supported it — but the far more modest “low-level grounded ice reaching about the present coastline.” That remains geographically admissible for North Devon in a way it never was for the south coast, where the erratics lie wholly beyond any reconstructed ice limit and rafting is effectively compelled. A single boulder resting on a shore platform is genuinely hard to assign between a grounded margin standing at the coast and ice that floated there. But three things now tilt the balance toward rafting: the distribution is the wrong shape for an overriding sheet; there is a dated mechanism for rafting onto a high shore platform; and the absence of any surviving high-level erratic is itself an argument that no thick ice overrode these cliffs.

What it does not change

This is the better-supported position, not the agreed one. Bennett et al. (2024), in their recent review of Devon’s Quaternary, (published before the re-examination reported here), restated the glacial reading, and the matter is not closed. Nor does any of it disprove glaciation in North Devon; it removes two pieces of evidence that were doing more work than they could bear. If there is a moral, it is a dull methodological one that cuts in every direction: a single anomalous boulder is a poor foundation for an ice sheet. The Ramson Cliff block was carrying an ice margin on its back. It turns out to have been carried there by people.

The North Devon erratics are best read not as the wreckage of an ice sheet that climbed the cliffs, but as the marine signature of a high relative sea level with calving ice somewhere offshore. The two stones that seemed to say otherwise were, on inspection, saying something else entirely — one a local stone that never moved, the other a stone that moved, but not by ice.

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References

Bennett, J.A., Cullingford, R.A., Gibbard, P.L., Hughes, P.D. & Murton, J.B. (2024). The Quaternary Geology of Devon. Proceedings of the Ussher Society 15, 84–130.

Campbell, S., et al. (1998). Quaternary of South-West England. Geological Conservation Review Series, No. 14. Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Peterborough.

Clark, C.D., et al. (2022). Growth and retreat of the last British–Irish Ice Sheet, 31 000 to 15 000 years ago: the BRITICE–CHRONO reconstruction. Boreas 51. https://doi.org/10.1111/bor.12594

Croot, D.G., Gilbert, A., Griffiths, J. & van der Meer, J.J. (1996). The character, age and depositional environments of the Fremington Clay Series, North Devon. Quaternary Newsletter 80: 1–15.

Daw, T., Ixer, R. & Madgett, P. (2026). A review of the Ramson Cliff erratic: evidence of high-level ice flow? Quaternary Newsletter 167: 13–19. https://doi.org/10.64926/qn.20517

Dewey, H. (1910). Notes on some igneous rocks from North Devon. Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 21(4): 429–434.

Evans, D.J.A., Harrison, S., Vieli, A. & Anderson, E. (2012). The glaciation of Dartmoor: the southernmost independent Pleistocene ice cap in the British Isles. Quaternary Science Reviews 45.

Madgett, P. & Madgett, R. (1974). High level erratic on Baggy Point. Quaternary Newsletter 14: 1–2.

Madgett, P.A. & Inglis, A.E. (1987). A re-appraisal of the erratic suite of the Saunton and Croyde areas, North Devon. Transactions of the Devonshire Association 119: 135–144.

Scourse, J.D., et al. (2021). Maximum extent and readvance dynamics of the Irish Sea Ice Stream and Irish Sea Glacier since the Last Glacial Maximum. Journal of Quaternary Science 36. https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.3313

Scourse, J.D., et al. (2024). The timing and magnitude of the British–Irish Ice Sheet between Marine Isotope Stages 5d and 2: implications for glacio-isostatic adjustment, high relative sea levels and ‘giant erratic’ emplacement. Journal of Quaternary Science. https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.3611

Smedley, R.K., et al. (2017). New age constraints for the limit of the British–Irish Ice Sheet on the Isles of Scilly. Journal of Quaternary Science 32. https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.2922

Veness, et al. (2025). Modelling erratic dispersal accounting for shifting ice flow geometries. Journal of Quaternary Science. https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.3720

King's College Sarsen Lecture

 

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/silcretes-stone-tools-the-origins-of-the-sarsen-megaliths-at-stonehenge

It's Not Ritual, Mike — It's a Content Farm

I wondered about the phenomenon of AI-produced videos that Mike Pitts has highlighted, the unasked question of why. Incentives matter. So it seemed appropriate to ask an AI the question.

Follow the money (such as it is)

These are content farms. Pitts himself identifies one Instagram account as based in the Philippines — not incidentally, one of the major hubs for AI content farming alongside India and parts of West Africa. A Kapwing study from late 2025 identified 278 YouTube channels producing nothing but AI slop: collectively 63 billion views, an estimated $117 million in annual ad revenue. The top channels pull $4 million a year.

The channels Pitts found aren't in that league — low views, low subscribers. But the marginal cost of each video is close to zero. Stitch together AI clips, overlay a synthetic voiceover, bolt on SEO tags ("Stonehenge mystery," "how was Stonehenge built"), and you have a lottery ticket that costs nothing to print. YouTube CPM for history content aimed at US/UK viewers runs $5–12 per thousand impressions. A few hundred views multiplied across dozens of daily uploads across disposable channels adds up — not to a fortune in London, but to real money in Manila or Lagos. As the Manila Bulletin noted, the strategy is simple: flood the platform, earn from volume.

That's why the channel names — BRIGHT SIDE, The Strange Vault, Chewy Playz, PyramidCoin — are disposable nonsense. They're fishing nets, not brands. The four Easter Island videos posted on a single day aren't an algorithm responding to Pitts' curiosity. They're a production line scaling up on a trending topic cluster.

Is the apocalypse nigh?

Pitts' concluding vision — AI cannibalising itself until original research vanishes — deserves pushback. The Stonehenge video has about 500 views. YouTube's own algorithm now penalises low-effort AI content with up to a five-fold reach reduction, and CEO Neal Mohan used the phrase "AI slop" in his January 2026 letter, pledging enforcement. The platform has already terminated or wiped at least 17 channels.

The real loss is narrower: the middle ground once occupied by decent popular television, where a casually curious viewer might have stumbled on something approximately true. That's worth worrying about. But the web has been through content-farm infestations before — Google's Panda update crushed the keyword-stuffing epidemic of 2009–2011. The cycle of exploitation and platform response doesn't end in civilisational collapse. It ends in better filtering, with damage done in the interim.

What can be done?

For individuals: source literacy. Check the channel, the subscriber count, the production style. If the voiceover sounds like a machine reading a script written by a machine summarising Wikipedia, trust your instincts.

For platforms: enforce the existing rules. Mandatory AI-content labelling under YouTube's 2026 transparency policy is a start, but only if permanent demonetisation for non-disclosure is applied at scale. Provenance standards like C2PA need wider adoption. Raising monetisation thresholds for new channels would make the throwaway-channel model less viable.

For creators: keep making the real thing. Structured metadata, transcripts, institutional collaboration, and presence on platforms that reward quality over volume all help. So does writing sharp blog posts pointing out that Neolithic Wiltshire did not, in fact, have windfarms.

Pitts is right that there's a problem. But it's not a metaphysical crisis. It's low-grade commercial fraud enabled by cheap tools and a platform that hasn't caught up with enforcement. 

Stonehenge, the Neolithic Olympic Park

 

The press is full of reports this morning that the original Stonehenge build was basically the Neolithic London 2012 Olympics: wildly over budget, chaotically organised, drug fueled frolics to glorify dodgy leaders and authoritarian regimes? At least I think that is the implication of Win Scutt's theory, maybe.

The press reports are to celebrate the completion of the modern Kusuma Neolithic Hall. My friend Luke Winter ran a tight, respectful ship — no nonsense, just proper experimental archaeology and a brilliant volunteer team who built the whole 7-metre beauty using only authentic methods. It came in on time, on vision and full of heart. London 2012 could’ve learned a thing or two.

A sample of the Press:

• English Heritage’s official page on the Kusuma Neolithic Hall
• The Independent’s first look inside
• The Times piece that ran with Win’s theory

Devizes Sheela na gig

Just down the road from the Museum in Devizes is St John's Church, I always like to check on the corbels when I pass.

"These figures were discovered by Dr Theresa Oakley and Dr Alex Woodcock who published their findings in the paper “The Romanesque Corbel Table at St John’s, Devizes and its Sheela na gig” (The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine Volume 99 2006). The Sheela na gig of the title is one of a pair of exhibitionist figures on a corbel. This makes this corbel the third exhibitionist pair discovered so far in the UK, the other two being at Kirknewton and the window lintel at Whittlesford." - More, not for the fainthearted, at https://sheelanagig.org/devizes-st-john/

Sheela na gig corbel, Devizes by Kenneth Lymer on Sketchfab

An AI cleanup by Grok of the pair.

In Search of the Giant Stones | Stonehenge Access All Areas Ep 2

New Sidebar Tools: Fact Checker, Second Reviewer & Site Search

I’ve added three new widgets to the sidebar to support reading and research on sarsen.org.

These tools are designed to help evaluate claims, review documents, and find relevant content on the site. They all use Grok, with prompts written to maintain high standards of evidence. Other AI tools are available and I would urge you to use them as well, Grok just produced the cleanest widgets and is very good at fact checking. Having detailed prompts prewritten improves the ease and accuracy of using AI agents.

1. Archaeological Fact Checker

This widget helps assess the strength of individual claims.

You can paste a URL or a block of text, and it opens a structured analysis that evaluates claims according to a clear hierarchy:

• Peer-reviewed papers as the highest standard
• Academic consensus
• Single-author assertions, which are examined using logical and Bayesian-style reasoning

It’s particularly useful when encountering claims in articles, social media, or discussions about Stonehenge, bluestones, sarsens, or Neolithic archaeology.

2. Second Reviewer

This tool is designed for reviewing papers and drafts.

It offers two options:

• Review Pasted Text — Paste a section or excerpt for a structured review covering the referenced science, logic, inferences, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Open Grok for PDF / Document Upload — Opens Grok with a detailed reviewer prompt already loaded. You can then upload a full PDF or document directly for a more thorough review. This version also provides suggestions for improvement when reviewing drafts.

It applies the same evidence standards as the Fact Checker, with a focus on peer-reviewed sources and logical rigour.

3. Search sarsen.org with Grok

This is a site-specific search tool.

Instead of a general search, queries are directed toward content on sarsen.org. It’s useful when you want to find posts or information on particular topics (such as specific monuments, papers, or debates) without leaving the site’s context.

How to use them

All three widgets are available in the sidebar. They are intended as aids rather than definitive answers. The quality of the output depends on the prompt and the material provided. As with any AI-assisted tool, it remains important to check original sources, especially peer-reviewed papers.

These tools are experimental and will likely be refined over time. Feedback on how they perform is welcome.

Thinking Three Dimensional

 Most glacial reconstructions are drawn in two dimensions. Ice limits appear on maps as lines advancing across the landscape, with arrows showing flow directions. This creates a comforting sense of certainty: the ice reached here, stopped there, and therefore must have overridden everything in between.

But glaciers do not advance across flat maps. They move through three-dimensional space, and height matters enormously.

North Devon sits at the southern limit of contested Irish Sea ice extent, which makes the elevation question here more than academic. The Fremington Clay series and the scattered erratics along the Croyde–Saunton shoreline contain far-travelled material; some of it almost certainly arrived via ice-rafting or ice-marginal processes when Irish Sea ice occupied the Bristol Channel. That much is uncontroversial, and it is not what is at issue.

What is at issue is whether that ice actually came onto the land at any significant elevation above the contemporary shoreline — whether the ice limit drawn on a map translates into ice that physically overrode the ground behind the coast.

The evidence does not support that conclusion. Credible far-travelled material in north Devon is concentrated at or near modern sea level. The Fremington Clay sequence is largely confined below 30 m OD. The scattered erratics along the Croyde–Saunton coast are coastal features. Above that level, the record goes quiet. There are no well-documented glacial deposits on the north Devon mainland at meaningful elevations, no striated pavements, no till sheets, no unambiguous trains of transported material that would indicate ice moving across the land surface.

The Ramson Cliff boulder at around 80 m OD on Baggy Point has been repeatedly cited as the exception — proof that Irish Sea ice reached significant elevation on the north Devon coast. It deserves to be examined on its own terms rather than accepted by inference from two-dimensional ice maps. A peer-reviewed re-examination published this year concludes that it does not function as reliable evidence of glacial emplacement at that elevation: there are no supporting glacial deposits at that height, no coherent glaciological mechanism that would place it there, and no record of the boulder's existence before 1969 despite earlier surveys of the area (Daw, Ixer & Madgett 2026, Quaternary Newsletter 167: 13–19, doi:10.64926/qn.20517). An exotic stone in an anomalous position is not self-evidently a glacial erratic. Further discussion and statistical analysis are available at sarsen.org (February and October 2025).

The logical point here is simple and applies well beyond north Devon. A glacier can reach a coastline without surmounting the ground behind it. Ice-rafting can deliver boulders to a shoreline without the ice sheet having climbed the hills. The two-dimensional line on a map — the ice limit — tells us where the ice margin sat, not how high it reached into the interior. Treating a mapped ice limit as a guarantee of inland overriding conflates the plan view with the vertical reality.

Until robust, well-contextualised evidence appears — glacial deposits, striated surfaces, or unequivocal erratics at meaningful elevations on the north Devon mainland with documented discovery contexts — the most defensible reading on current evidence is also the most conservative one: Irish Sea ice influenced the coastal zone of north Devon at low levels. The case for significant inland incursion at elevation remains unproven.

No Sarsen in the Roadstone: What the A344 Excavations Reveal About Stonehenge’s Missing Stones

It is sometimes suggested that many of Stonehenge’s “missing” stones — sarsens or bluestones that once stood but are no longer visible — were broken up and reused, including as road metal or hardcore during the turnpike era or later repairs. The A344, which ran immediately past the monument and crossed the Avenue, is occasionally invoked in such discussions.

Two detailed archaeological reports from the Stonehenge Environmental Improvements Project (SEIP) — the works that closed and removed the relevant section of the A344 — allow us to examine this claim directly against primary evidence. They reveal what materials were actually used to build and maintain the road right beside Stonehenge.

The Reports

Powell et al. 2019 Andrew B. Powell (with contributions by Phil Harding, Rob Ixer, Matt Leivers and others). “Along the road to Stonehenge: investigations of the Stonehenge Avenue and within the World Heritage Site.” Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine vol. 112 (2019), pp. 197–216. This is the full post-excavation report on mitigation works in 2014–15, including hand-excavated slots through the Avenue ditches and the edge of the Heel Stone ditch within the former road line, plus watching briefs and recording.

Wessex Archaeology 2011 Stonehenge Environmental Improvements Project: A344 Works, Stonehenge, Wiltshire. Archaeological Watching Brief Report. Report ref: 76860.03 (March 2011). This covers the earlier watching brief during site investigation trial pits (February 2011) along the A344, in the old visitor car park, and at Airman’s Corner.

Both reports are available via standard archaeological channels (the 2019 paper in WANHM; the 2011 report via Wessex Archaeology / OASIS).

What the Road Was Actually Made Of

2011 trial pits (12 small hand-excavated pits): The consistent sequence was modern tarmac over layers of hogging and road make-up/levelling. Materials included stone aggregate, limestone fragments, flint, gravelly sand, and in places clinker or industrial waste. These overlay truncated natural chalk. No sarsen or bluestone was recorded in the road construction layers. The pits were shallow and small, but they sampled the road fabric directly.

2014–15 excavations (Powell et al. 2019): Where the road crossed the Avenue, the make-up consisted of layers of compacted flint and crushed chalk rubble. In a more complex 3 m × 10 m slot near the old car park entrance there were additional layers: reddish-brown sand, spreads of large stones, greenish-yellow sand and sandstone (containing one fragment of ceramic building material), flint gravel, a band of large limestone blocks (c. 0.3 m wide × 0.2 m thick), limestone hardcore, and compacted flints.

The Avenue’s internal banks had been levelled during road construction, but the ditches themselves survived in form and fill sequence broadly comparable to earlier excavations outside the road line (e.g., by the Vatchers and Pitts). Periglacial striations and natural features were still visible in plan and section where road material was fully removed, indicating that truncation was not total everywhere.

Crucially, no sarsen or bluestone fragments are reported from the road bedding, sub-base, or make-up layers in either report.

This pattern is not unique to the A344. Local flint, chalk, and limestone appear to have been the standard materials for the area's turnpike roads. Whether the A303 itself conceals anything different has never been specifically tested.

Where Stonehenge Stone Was Found

Bluestone (mostly rhyolite, Group C, with one possible Group E piece that could relate to orthostat SH48) and sarsen fragments were recovered — but from the tertiary fills of the Avenue ditches (contexts 10070 southern ditch; 10081 northern ditch), not from the road construction. These were accompanied by worked flint. The assemblage is interpreted in the context of known stone-working activity near the Avenue terminals (previously recorded by Pitts) or as material that entered the ditches over time. Average artefact weights and the absence of microdebitage in sieved residues suggest these are not in-situ working floor deposits within the ditches themselves. Some material may be later than the main prehistoric use of the monument.

Animal bone, post-medieval pottery, and clay-pipe fragments appeared only in the uppermost fills — consistent with later intrusion or deposition into already silted features.

Discussion and the Question

The A344 section past Stonehenge was metalled in the early 1760s as part of the Amesbury–Shrewton turnpike and subsequently repaired and resurfaced. The materials used were the standard local ones available in the chalk downland or brought in: flint, crushed chalk, sand, and limestone.

Despite the road running immediately adjacent to Stonehenge, crossing the Avenue, and close to the Heel Stone, the detailed examinations reveal no incorporation of broken sarsen or bluestone from the monument into the road fabric.

William Stukeley's survey of 1721 already shows the outer circle incomplete, so any robbing of sarsen predates the construction of the A344 turnpike in the early 1760s, but pre-turnpike roads and tracks were a parish and landowner affair, maintained from whatever came to hand locally, so the absence of sarsen from those earlier surfaces and trackways is even more telling than its absence from the more organised turnpike era.

If, as sometimes suggested, missing or fallen stones from Stonehenge were broken up for road metal or hardcore, especially for this road so proximate to the site, we would expect to see traces in the sections meticulously excavated and recorded. Yet none are reported. The stone fragments present are contextualised within the prehistoric (or later) ditch silts and are discussed in relation to monument-associated activity, not road building.

The absence of sarsen or bluestone in the documented road construction layers is a negative observation that may have some bearing on discussions of whether the monument was ever fully completed in stone.

This observation doesn’t rule out reuse of stone elsewhere in the landscape or for other purposes, nor does it address every possible missing stone. Sarsen is exceptionally hard and durable; breaking it into usable roadstone would have been far more laborious than using abundant flint or quarried limestone. The reports simply show that, for this specific and well-examined road section, that does not appear to have happened.

Why This Matters

The SEIP excavations gave us an unusually clear window into both the prehistoric Avenue and the post-medieval road that overlay it. The contrast is instructive: the road was built with what was locally abundant and practical. The megalithic stones that left traces did so in the expected archaeological contexts, ditch fills associated with the monument, not used or scattered through road layers. The two reports discussed here provide a detailed record from the section of the A344 immediately adjacent to the monument, in which no sarsen or bluestone was identified within the make-up layers.

The lack of sarsen or bluestone in the road make-up provides no support for the suggestion that stones from Stonehenge were broken up for local road construction. Additional work on road fabrics elsewhere in the area would help place this negative observation in context.

Other explanations for the absence of stones have occasionally been proposed. These include the possibility that stones were broken up and reused in other local roads or tracks (though no supporting evidence has yet been identified in published reports from the A303 corridor or elsewhere in the immediate area), incorporation into buildings or field walls (for which there is similarly little documented evidence in the locality), or conversion into artefacts such as querns. The hypothesis that certain stone positions were never filled has also been discussed, although observations of parchmarks in 2013 provided evidence consistent with the former presence of posts in some previously uncertain locations. Earlier timber phases are well attested at Stonehenge. Was it a wooden monument being replaced in stone piecemeal, a process that was never completed?

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References

Fitzpatrick, R. 2011. Stonehenge Environmental Improvements Project, A344 Works, Stonehenge, Wiltshire: Archaeological Watching Brief Report. Unpublished grey literature report, Wessex Archaeology, Salisbury. WA Report ref. 76860.03. OASIS ID: wessexar1-98456.

Pitts, M.W. 1982. On the road to Stonehenge: report on the investigations beside the A344 in 1968, 1979 and 1980. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 48, 75–132.

Powell, A.B., with contributions by Harding, P., Higbee, L., Ixer, R., Leivers, M., López-Dóriga, I., Mepham, L. and Norcott, D. 2019. Along the road to Stonehenge: investigations of the Stonehenge Avenue and within the World Heritage Site. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 112, 197–216.

Wessex Archaeology. Stonehenge: Archaeology on the A303 Improvement.

Visualising the Secondary Solstice Axis with a Clever Lunar Trick

Independent researcher Simon Banton has published a clear and accessible blog post explaining how he used the Moon as a proxy for the ancient Sun to test and visualise Stonehenge’s secondary solstice axis.

Photo of the lunar proxy of the Midwinter Solstitial Sunrise over the Altar Stone - photo - Simon Banton

The Problem

The Earth’s axial tilt (obliquity) was slightly greater (~24°) when Stonehenge’s sarsens were erected around 2500 BC. This means the Sun no longer rises and sets at exactly the same horizon positions the Neolithic builders saw. Direct observation of the ancient winter solstice sunrise is impossible today.

The Clever Lunar Solution

During a major lunar standstill (which we’re in now), the Moon reaches more extreme positions on the horizon than the modern Sun. Banton timed his observations for July 2024/2025 so the Moon rose very close to where the winter solstice Sun would have appeared 4,500 years ago.

He captured the event from a position aligned with the proposed sightline — looking through the notch in Stone 58 and the edge of Stone 53 toward Coneybury Hill. The results are striking: the Moon acted as an excellent stand-in, confirming the alignment works.

Why This Matters

• The sightline is tightly framed and runs parallel to and directly above the long axis of the Altar Stone.
• It forms an ~80° angle with the primary solstice axis (summer sunrise to winter sunset) — exactly as expected for the solstice extremes at Stonehenge’s latitude in 2500 BC.
• This supports the earlier proposal by Gordon & Phyllis Freeman and reinforces the idea that the monument was deliberately designed around two intersecting solstice axes from the start.

You can read Simon’s blog post here: Using the Moon as a Proxy for the Ancient Sun

(Note: Simon has also written a more detailed peer-reviewed version which is currently behind a paywall, https://doi.org/10.1558/jsa.33686 )

Stonehenge Access All Areas - Film 1

Fremington Pottery

 I was very kindly given this Fishley Jug from the Fremington Pottery by Julian Richards. A treasured gift. From ice age clay to a beautiful and useful object.