'Jaw-dropping': how did altar stone get to Stonehenge from far north of Scotland?

For more than a century, archaeologists have known that some of the stones at Stonehenge came from Wales and were transported -somehow about 125 miles to the site of the Neolithic monument on Salisbury Plain.

- Esther Addley

Now, a "jaw-dropping" study has revealed that one of Stonehenge's central megaliths is not Welsh at all - it is actually Scottish.

In a discovery described by one of the scientists involved as "genuinely shocking", analysis has found that the largest "bluestone" at Stonehenge was dragged or floated from the very north-east corner of Scotland - a distance of at least 466 miles.

The astonishing finding that the megalith, which is known as the "altar stone", was transported by prehistoric people from at least as far as present-day Inverness, and potentially from Orkney, "doesn't just alter what we think about Stonehenge, it alters what we think about the whole of the late Neolithic", said Rob Ixer, an honorary senior research fellow at University College London (UCL) and one of the experts behind the study, which was published in Nature yesterday.

"It completely rewrites the relationships between the Neolithic populations of the whole of the British Isles," he said. "The science is beautiful and it's remarkable, and it's going to be discussed for decades to come... It is jaw-dropping."