£100 up for grabs

Elsewhere I posted "give me the details of a single glacial stone that is in its natural placement, or reliably recorded before being humanly moved, on Salisbury Plain. A bet: I'll give £100 to your favourite charity if you can and £100 to mine if you can't, from you."

The world's leading expert on Salisbury Plain Glacial Erratics has refused to take the bet but insists there are lots of them.

My response: "Put up or shut up"

If you know better claim the money.

Detmar Blow and the Meteorite - Andrew Ziminski's Theory.

UPDATE - an 1899 photograph of it has been found in place, which refutes this theory.  https://collections.salisburymuseum.org.uk/object/SBYWM:1947.39.9

In 2013 I theorised that the big pit in front of the middle trilithon may have once held the Lake House meteorite. https://www.sarsen.org/2013/04/the-mystery-pit-in-centre-of-stonehenge.html

The Lake House Meteorite a 92.75kg stone landed about 30,000 years ago, no crater has been found so it may have been onto the Ice Age ice at that time, and may not have been anywhere near Stonehenge. About 10,000 years ago it was exposed to the elements and started weathering. About 4000 years ago it was buried in the local chalk before being dug up in probably Victorian times.

Pictures from Colin Pillinger's 2012 Royal Society lecture

My theory was that this strange stone was brought to Stonehenge very early on, it was buried in the holiest central position in recognition of its unique qualities. A generation or so later it was decreed that some leader's tomb, or other place was more fitting for it and so like the Stone of Scone it was moved to please the leader. This involved excavating the pit to find and remove it. The pit was then filled in and the bluestone horseshoe erected.

I think the pit isn't for erecting something or burying something, it looks more like a quarrying pit used to extract something heavy that was already buried  in front of the Great Trilithon. To bury or erect a stone a steep sided hole fits the purpose, but to drag something out a shallow slope is needed, in the absence of lifting gear,

Our Victorian diggers then found it in its secondary burial place in a barrow.

It is remiss of me that I have not mentioned Andrew Ziminski in his brilliant book The Stone Mason refines this theory by wondering if instead of Rev.Edward Duke or his ilk finding it in a barrow in the early part of Victoria's reign it was actually found by Detmar Blow in the big pit in the centre of Stonehenge. Detmar Blow was not only entrusted with the 1901 remedial work at Stonehenge, which involved with Gowland the excavation to the edge of the big pit as they straightened Stone 56  but he was also in charge of restoring Lake House in 1898 and subsequent work there. The theory being that it was found and removed in 1901 during Gowland's excavations by Blow and taken to Lake House as a curio.

There doesn't seem to be any record of the meteorite at Lake House before 1905 so Andrew's theory is appealing.

UPDATE September 2024 - an 1899 photograph of it has been found in place, which refutes this theory.  https://collections.salisburymuseum.org.uk/object/SBYWM:1947.39.9

-------

Stonehenge by Mike Parker Pearson in Chapter 8 p.129 - 132 discusses the large pit in the centre of Stonehenge:

He pieces together evidence about it from excavations by Atkinson, Hawley and Gowland and concludes it dates to 2440-2100 BC, after the Great Trilithon was erected and that it was filled back up in prehistory because a bluestone was set into it as part of the inner oval of bluestones.

Atkinson thought it was the ramp for the erection of Stone 56 - photos below - but MPP shows it wasn't. The dark area of the ramp can be seen on the side of the excavation leading down towards the base of 56 but  it is too shallow to be of use and doesn't join up to Gowland's excavation around the base of 56.

MPP declares the purpose of this huge pit, estimated as 12 metres long, 5 metres wide and 2.4 metres wide to be a "complete mystery". The size is very approximate as edges haven't been found.

A glacially-transported clast at Stonehenge reviewed.

There is a new paper published on Researchgate.net - It isn't peer reviewed, and is a work in progress and so it would be unfair to review it too harshly.  

A glacially-transported clast at Stonehenge

• DOI: 
• 10.13140/RG.2.2.10110.25925

The first descriptive paragraph ends: "the Newall Boulder was worked or dressed, it was probably found in one place and dumped in another. However, there is no reason to think that it was carried to Stonehenge from many kilometres away."

And of of course there are many reasons to think it may well have been, it was found within circles of 90 or so other stones that were brought from many kilometres away.  There is a quote that humanly transporting such a boulder to Stonehenge would indicate a lack of common sense but then common sense was not the motivation for the building of Stonehenge.  Stones are carried across the land for many reasons beyond practicality, though in this case this one might be well just be part of a larger stone that was part of the bluestone circle, they are carried in remembrance of people and places, they may be a sacred relic, they may merely be a packing stone.

The actual data about the stone are still sparse and the writer acknowledges it in a heartfelt plea for more research and as such he is making bricks without straw when he theorises further.

The geological description raises only two points of interest, in its history it seems to have lain mostly exposed in a acidic environment, but then has been buried in chalk. In the chalk small clumps of calcareous tufa have grown on the surface.  The extract from Kellaway's 1991 Hot Springs of Bath book makes this point: 

That the tufa patches have grown after the boulder has been bashed about shows the burial in chalk was after it had become an artefact; they are obvious on the fresh dark surface to the top left. And that it was buried in the chalk after it had been worked is strong evidence that it was brought by humans from its acidic homeland to Wiltshire.

The other point raised is that: "The apparent streamlining on a patchy quartz deposit on one flattened flank of the boulder is interpreted as the result of slickensiding on a fault plane"  That this resolution of what Kellway thought might be glacial striae is included is to the great credit of the paper because without this striated flattened face having a glacial origin there is no evidence of glacial transport. 

So there is no physical evidence it was glacially transported but there is that its arrival in Wiltshire was at the time of it being used by humans, when many other stones were being brought by humans, to where it was found a hundred years ago.

To sum up it seems the author simply refuses to acknowledge that neolithic people were as capable as modern humans. That they could not have transported a rock from Wales to Wiltshire is his fixed view and everything must be seen through that lens.

Bluestone Weights

The Bluestones of Stonehenge weighed about a maximum of 3 tonnes when they were first erected. They are not massive boulders. They are about the same weight as the average weight of a stone used to build the Great Pyramids of Egypt. The pyramids used over two million of those sized stones.

Marcus Abbott and Hugo Anderson-Whymark's report Stonehenge Laser Scan: Archaeological Analysis  includes this table of above ground weights. Allowing for a third of the stone below ground, the heaviest is about three tonnes. Many of the stones are less, some because they are smaller stones, some due to the degradations they have suffered over time.

  

Then a miracle occurs

Copyrighted artwork by Sydney Harris Inc. Published in Wade, Michael. (2016). From Ockham's razor to Rube Goldberg: Don't rely on forensic age-dating miracles. Environmental Forensics. 17. 131-135. 10.1080/15275922.2016.1163754. 

Oh, please. Assuming in step two that a rock was found "nearby" without evidence means that the convoluted reasoning that depends on the provenance of the rock is meaningless.

Occam's razor rules that a rock found in a jumble of other rocks transported to the area by humans is more likely to be also transported there by humans than by an Ice Fairy. 

There are no glacial erratics, moraines, debris, drumlins, drifts or eskers recorded as having been found naturally on Salisbury Plain. There are lots of large stones that humans have moved. Some of the large stones may have been glacial erratics or debris but they were then transported by humans. It is where they were moved from that needs to be shown not where they ended up if you want to demonstrate a glacial theory.

Route of the Stonehenge Stones across the Pewsey Vale

 The BGS has just released an updated Geology viewer - https://geologyviewer.bgs.ac.uk/ - a very useful resource and fascinating to browse.

I thought I would revisit my proposed stone route across the Pewsey Vale which has, since I first proposed it on this blog, been largely adopted by serious researchers. While it is worth remembering that the easiest route isn't necessarily the one that was chosen, if they had wanted an easy life they wouldn't have started on building Stonehenge, there must have been a certain practicality involved.

From the Marlborough Downs to Salisbury Plain means the Pewsey Vale must be crossed. Before modern drainage large parts of it were marshy, as was the whole flat width of the Avon valley south of the Vale. Swamps are not great for dragging stones through. There are also some quite steep hills in the Vale, including Etchilhampton Hill which Atkinson's route went over. I would suggest skirting them was sensible.

So on the map we are looking for the easiest way across which avoids the hills and the areas marked as being peaty or alluvial clay. It seems that from Adam's Grave to near Redhorn Hill the best route does go though Marden. Redhorn Hill on the Plain is the gateway to the flattest route across it and can be climbed up to by a gentle slope from south of Marden.

Map from BGS - route overlain by Tim Daw

Click to embiggen

My original leaflet on the route can be found here 

Of course it wasn't just Sarsen Stones that were brought across the Vale. The bluestones were most logically brought to England near Gloucester, I favour the A40 overland route but it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe in rafting them round the south coast of Wales. From Gloucester the route to Marlborough is obvious and links to the Sarsen fields of the Downs. 

Stonehenge Bluestones brought from Pembrokeshire - Salisbury Museum Director, 1876

A very early linking of the Bluestones and Pembrokeshire I hadn't seen before - hat-tip to the private Stonehenge History Society. 

Salisbury meeting of the Wiltshire Archæological and Natural History Society. Jottings of some of the objects of interest in the “Stonehenge excursion;” Thursday, August 24, 1876,

By Edward Thomas Stevens  F.S.A, Director of the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum· 1876

Reprinted  in:

Jottings on Some of the Objects of Interest in the Stonehenge Excursion

By Edward Thomas Stevens  F.S.A, Director of the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum · 1882