Stonehenge: bluestones came from Prescelly (E.R.)

CELTIC NOTES.

STONEHENGE.

It is interesting to note in Dr. H. H. Thomas’s recent discovery that the stones of the inner ring at Stonehenge were transported there from a great distance, probably from the Prescelly district in South Wales, the confirmation of an old Celtic legend. A Welsh tradition has it that Merlin by art magic and wizardy transported the stones there in a single night from Ireland. This is according to the common preference in a wonder-tale for any venue but the nearest when some extraordinary wonder, natural or due to an agency that looks supernatural, has to be accounted for. In the same way London Bridge is brought into the story of King Arthur’s Sleep, where the Welsh boy meets the destined agent or wizard, and so with many other tales one might instance. The formula often begins or ends with au dela. To come back to Stonehenge and its far-fetched stone-circle, it seems (from a brief report picked up by chance at Assisi) that Dr. H. H. Thomas, who is a geologist and petrographer to the Government Survey, has by science, and something beside, been able to provide a clue to the mystery.

In his paper read before the Society of Antiquaries he described the two kinds of stones used at Stonehenge—the Sarsens in the main fabric, which are of local or Wiltshire origin, and the thirty-four stones in the inner ring and horseshoe, which are of another kind altogether. Hitherto the exact source of the latter has been a complete puzzle. They include dolerites, rhyolites, and one micaceous red sandstone—the so-called “Altar Stone.” Years ago Sir Jethro Teall pointed out that their source should be sought in some district where these three types can be found together; and now Dr. Thomas, thanks to his twelve years’ surveying in Carmarthen and Pembroke shires, has significantly filled in the petrographic register. At the eastern end of the Prescelly mountain in North Pembrokeshire these very types of stones do occur in close companionship. As he says:

The dolerites of Stonehenge and Prescelly possess highly characteristic white spots not found elsewhere. With the Prescelly dolerites is associated a rhyolite identical with that of Stonehenge, and the altar stone is similar to the old red sandstone on the north shores of Milford Haven. In addition, fragments in the soil at Stonehenge representing stones which have now disappeared can be correlated to Prescelly types. The distance between Stonehenge and the area from which these stones were derived and which is strictly limited is about 180 miles. Another question: “How were these stones transported?” The only explanation is that they were transported by human agency. Why, then, should all local sources of supply be neglected and the stones employed taken from a place a great distance away? Dr. Thomas thinks the first stones to be erected at Stonehenge were those from Pembrokeshire, and the reason why they were brought to Stonehenge was that they previously stood in the form of a circle close to their outcrops, where the remains of eight stone circles can still be seen. The stones were brought in a rough state, but it is not known whether they were dressed by the people who brought them or by those who constructed the fabric as it now is.

The Master-Builders.

These questions raise again the old uncertainty of the human estimate in accounting for such structures of antiquity. Writing in a hill-city of Umbria, whose height is crowned by a fortress so huge that it must have required an army of masons, whose every street bears witness to the powers of the master-builder and his control of workers in multiple, used in that contempt of human life which marked the early Middle Ages, one understands that Merlin at Stonehenge is a symbol of the Etruscans and the Umbrians who built places like Perugia, Assisi, and that mighty castle of La Rocca, to which the Italian architect Alfonso Brizi devoted his book of 1898, “Della Rocca di Assisi,” using it as an example of the military architecture of the countyRead ‘country’; subtitle calls castle “monumento nazionale”. In Pembroke and Carmarthen shires, one may see such mighty fortresses, sometimes on Roman bases, and the men who built them were working in the tradition, I suppose, of their forbears who built circles at Prescelly, and those others who carried them to Stonehenge.
E. R.