Briefing Chat: The epic journey of Stonehenge’s central stone

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:04)
Hi, listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to the Friday Briefing Show, where we talk about a couple of stories we've read about in The Nature Briefing. And it's me and Nick this week. Nick Petrich, how are you doing?

**Nick Patrick-Hall** (0:15)
I'm doing well, Ben. How's it going for you?

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:17)
It's going A-OK. I've got a story I am excited to talk about today. So I'll go first if you'll let me. And you know that I love anything related to Stonehenge or other massive Neolithic site, within Henge or Henge adjacent. Let's be honest.

**Nick Patrick-Hall** (0:32)
Anything Henge or Henge adjacent has come up many times in our chat. So what's the new Henge news this week?

**Benjamin Thompson** (0:37)
Well, this is a story I read about on the BBC Science Focus website, based on a Journal of Quaternary Science paper. And it's a continuation of a story that was published a couple of years ago in Nature about Stonehenge, and it was covered on the podcast. And it was covered by you, Nick, and it was all about the Altar Stone. Do you remember this one?

**Nick Patrick-Hall** (0:55)
I do remember the Altar Stone. This was a paper where people were trying to trace the origins of the Altar Stone, the big central stone at Stonehenge. And they suggested that it come from the Orcadian Basin, which is this part of Northern Scotland and the Orkney Islands.

**Benjamin Thompson** (1:12)
Absolutely right. So a lot of Stonehenge is believed to have come from Wales to the West about 150 miles, maybe 250 kilometres from where these stones are now standing. But yeah, you're right. This Altar Stone, which is partially buried by another bit of rock, came from maybe 500 miles, maybe 750 kilometres away. And at the time, a question that you and I and a lot of the news team had, and I think the researchers themselves had, is how on earth did the people who made Stonehenge take this enormous six ton, 16 feet long, five metre long bit of rock from the far north of Scotland to the south of England? Now, you and I both know this is a difficult journey, right? There's mountains, there's hills, there's a lot of woodland at the time. This isn't just a simple straight shot.

**Nick Patrick-Hall** (1:57)
No, it's not a straight shot at all. And that's why when I spoke to the researchers on that paper you mentioned, they suggested that perhaps it had come by boat. Is that what people have found? Or have they found some other alternative route?

**Benjamin Thompson** (2:10)
They have found another alternative route, but it is based on water, frozen water, specifically. Nick, it may be that ice has done a bit of the heavy lifting here to help move this stone to where it is now. So the conclusion that they've come to is that ice flows, so a glacier essentially may have carried this stone part of the way at least during Britain's last ice age, which was about 30,000 to maybe 10,000 years ago. But it gets a bit more complicated because the ice didn't do all of the work. It didn't take it all of the way to essentially the Stonehenge site. Previous work suggested that that area of the UK wasn't glaciated at the time. So what this paper suggests is that ice kind of moved this stone, not directly south from Scotland to the Stonehenge location, but kind of southeast and ultimately maybe took it half the distance, depositing it in what's known as Dogger Bank, which was part of this thing called Dogger Land.

**Nick Patrick-Hall** (3:10)
This was actually suggested to me by a researcher at the time that could be a possibility. So it's interesting that this analysis seems to support that. But that is only half the way. That's still quite a way to go, and you would have to go from this area still fairly far north of Stonehenge. So how perhaps did people make the rest of the journey with this massive stone?

**Benjamin Thompson** (3:30)
Yeah, that's a great question. And as is always the case with Stonehenge, there's more mystery to uncover, right? Because Dogger Bank was part of what was known as Dogger Land, this enormous sort of part of land that connected the UK to the rest of Europe. Now, Dogger Land doesn't exist anymore. It is underneath the North Sea, right? At the end of the Ice Age, ice melted, sea levels rose, and this area became inundated. So before that happened, this stone must have been moved from where it was resting to the mainland. And how this happened is a mystery, right? Like it may be involved maritime routes. There we are again. It may be involved what was known as the Berkshire Ridgeway, which is the oldest road in the UK, this kind of Neolithic trail that crosses a lot of the south of the UK. But what is clear is this must have happened, say, before Doggerland ceased to exist. But the timeline here gets weird, Nick, because that happened like 3,000 years before Stonehenge was put together. So a long time before. So this stone was maybe important for a reason? The folk who moved it clearly saw a need to move it. But why?