(The bluestone element of) Stonehenge first erected in Wales, claims the Guardian, in what it calls an "amazing" discovery.
Amazing if we hadn't been suspecting something along those lines ever since the source of the bluestones was discovered, yes. In case you're wondering, the bluestones probably aren't what you think of at all. They're much smaller rocks than the sarsens - the big sandstone lumps that make up the horseshoe and outer ring, the trilithons that people assume are "Stonehenge". Sarsens come from Wiltshire - still an impressive feat, but not so much as bringing the bluestones from Presceli.
The Guardian suggests that the stones were brought to Wiltshire as a sign of the unification of the tribes of southern Britain. Which is the sort of EU-phile, Unionist dreaming I expect from the Grauniad. Every age gets the Stonehenge it wants, and the Guardian gets one that symbolises peace, love and understanding in a sylvan prehistoric socialist Utopia.
An alternative suggestion, to me, is that the Stonehenge bluestones are the prehistoric Elgin Marbles. We know that Archdruid Enya, her successors and the Wiltshire Beaker People of the time were powerful enough to construct mighty structures like Durrington Walls and, for that matter, Stonehenge. What's to say they didn't simply wander into Wales for a holiday, discover it rained the whole time, beat up the local Elvis Tribe, and carry the whole lot back as proof they were the baddest? Would have left the locals all shook up, for sure. Not so nice, not so "let's all just get together, guys, and be at one in peace and harmony". Much more like human nature.
Meanwhile an alternative view published last month says there was no quarrying at all, and the stones were probably carried to Wiltshire by a giant glacier.
As long as the Welsh don't want them back. King Arthur Pendragon would be livid.
Nice chap, King Arthur Pendragon, helped by giving a pagan perspective when we reburied the 1,500 year old skeleton that had spent half a century in our church (much of the time hidden under the coffee table.)
ReplyDeleteI prefer your holiday souvenir theory of the bluestones to the glacial one because if they were erratics there would be evidence of smaller similar rocks where they were deposited.
I thought it was the Silurians the Wiltshire Beaker folk beat up, but that's what come of getting you historical knowledge from a certain Doctor.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair to the Grauniad, the theory that Neolithic Man dragged tons of rock from Wales to Wilture as a symbolic gesture is that of Professor Parker Pearson, not a Graun staff writer.
ReplyDeleteIt does leave me wondering, if that is what NeoMen did merely as an abstract gesture, what on earth did they do when they really wanted to make a point, eg declaring war?
Another possibility is that it was done in error, like the Anerican gentleman who bought London Bridge, shipped it across the Atlantic and rebuilt it in Arizona, all the time thinking that he had purchased Tower Bridge.
Seems to me that this could well be a deliberate "shaming" of the Welsh - dismantling their monument taking it of and probably playing cob with the geomancy of both sites. They probably told them they were taking them to build field boundaries!
ReplyDeleteYou see this sort of behaviour when the Romans came to York - the early Roman defences were fence posts (about 3"" across) cut from oak trees up to six foot in diameter. If those weren't a sacred grove they definitely should have been! the holy trees plit into matchwood to defend the conquerors!