The secrets of the stones

Where did Stonehenge’s megaliths come from? Were they transported to Wiltshire by glacier or human hand? And how long did this Neolithic building project take? As a major exhibition on Stonehenge opens at the British Museum, Mike Pitts uses the latest research to answer the big questions about the construction of this ancient wonder

- Mike Pitts

1 Where on Earth did the stones come from?

New technology is pinpointing the sources of the huge monoliths

Stonehenge shouldn’t be there. Its great standing stones – their total weight originally equivalent to that of 13 blue whales – loom starkly from a landscape without rock outcrops. So where were they quarried?

The 12th-century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote that giants had carried the megaliths from Africa to Ireland, and that Merlin then took them on to Salisbury Plain. Others such as the 16th-century lawyer John Rastell thought the stones had been moulded on the spot out of cement.

The 18th-century antiquary William Stukeley observed that not all of the stones were of the same type. He agreed with an earlier suggestion that the largest – sandstone blocks known as sarsens – hailed from near Marlborough, about 20 miles north of Stonehenge. But what of the other, smaller monoliths known as bluestones?