![]() ![]() In particular, Carn Alw, which is just under three-quarters of a mile from Carn Goedog, struck him as a particularly promising location. Thomas had examined the light shown through thin slices of bluestone under a microscope and analyzed them alongside samples of rocks gathered in the field he identified a number of outcroppings in the Preseli Hills, an area of rolling uplands close to the coast, as likely sources. The “provenancing” of the bluestones-the identification of their geographic source-began in earnest in 1923, when the geologist Herbert Henry Thomas posited that they had come originally from west Wales. The antiquarian William Stukeley, an early authority on Stonehenge, wrote that, compared with the sarsens, the bluestones were “of a different sort,” and harder to place. The mystery of the bluestones dates back to at least the seventeen-twenties. ![]() If Bevins and his colleagues are right, then the bluestones had been transported much farther than any other material used for stone circles in Europe. But the distance between Stonehenge and Carn Goedog is a hundred and forty miles-roughly three and a half hours by car. Most of the sarsens have been traced to a part of the Marlborough Downs, fifteen miles from Stonehenge. The rocks used for monuments like Stonehenge typically come from no more than a dozen miles away. Around three dozen bluestones stand among the sarsens-there are different ways of counting-with more buried underground. The bluestones are smaller the biggest is a little less than ten feet tall, and weighs more than three tons. Picture Stonehenge and you may first envision its huge standing stones, or sarsens. “To see the spots, you have to get inside,” Bevins said.īevins and his collaborators believe that Carn Goedog is the source for a slew of the “bluestones” used to build the prehistoric monument Stonehenge, in southern England. I looked in vain for the feature that gave them their geologic name-spotted dolerite. At close quarters, we could see that the rocks of Carn Goedog were dappled with lichen. In Welsh, “carn” refers to a mound of rocks “goedog” means full of trees. Our destination, Carn Goedog, jutted out above us. The territory opened into grassland, reaching up to a ridgeline etched against the sky. We climbed through a landscape tufted with reeds. In the summer of 2019, I walked up a hillside in west Wales with Richard Bevins, a researcher who specializes in petrology, the study of the origins, compositions, and structures of rocks. ![]()
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