The earliest megalithic circle at Stonehenge was first built in the west of Wales more than 5,000 years ago, before its stones were dug up and dragged over 140 miles (225 kilometers) to its present site in the west of England, new research suggests.
The findings also support a wild legend that the mythical wizard Merlin ordered giants to move Stonehenge from Ireland and rebuild it in its current location.
The researchers discovered the remains of the original stone circle in the Preseli Hills in Wales, near the ancient quarries where geologists have determined that Stonehenge’s famous bluestones were cut. The new study, published Thursday (Feb. 11) in the journal Antiquity, suggests that the bluestones that formed the first stage of Stonehenge may have symbolized the ancestors or lineages of the Neolithic people who lived near the quarries, which may have been why they took the stones with them when they left for a far-off region.
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The research could explain the mysterious origins of Stonehenge and why its first builders made such efforts to transport the massive stones almost halfway across Britain. “I had a hunch,” said Michael Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at University College London who led the team that made the discovery. “Why would anyone say, ‘We’re going to build a circle with stones from a quarry 140 miles away?’”
To solve the mystery, Parker Pearson and his team spent more than five years investigating Neolithic stone monuments around the Preseli Hills. In 2017, they determined that four stones at a site called Waun Mawn — “peaty moorland” in Welsh — were all that was left of a much larger circle of up to 60 stones that exactly matched the layout of the original 360-foot-wide (110 m) circle of bluestones at Stonehenge. The rest of the stones at Wuan Mawn had been dug up long ago, Parker Pearson told Live Science.
Ancient stones
Stonehenge is most famous for the giant “sarsens” in its main circle, but these large stones were erected centuries after the monument was first built. Recent research shows the sarsens are local sandstone boulders that were transported only a few miles to the Neolithic monument about 4,500 years ago.
But geologists and archaeologists have long known that the many bluestones that ring Stonehenge, some of which weigh up to 5 tons (4.5 metric tons), were transported in ancient times from quarries in the Preseli Hills. Some of the stones have a bluish tinge when they’re newly broken or wet.
Scientific dating of charcoal and sediments from some of the now-empty stone holes suggest Waun Mawn was built about 5,400 years ago, some 400 years before the earliest stage of Stonehenge, the researchers said. One of the stone holes at Waun Mawn also has an unusual five-sided cross section that matches one of the bluestones at Stonehenge and contains chips of the same type of rock.
Parker Pearson said it seems likely that the Waun Mawn stone circle and some other stones nearby were dismantled when entire families left the area to live far away in the east, and that up to 80 of the stones were later erected at the present Stonehenge site.
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