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An ancient myth about Stonehenge, first recorded 900 years ago, tells that the magician Merlin led men to Ireland to capture a magical stone circle called the Dance of the Giants and rebuild it in England as a monument to the dead.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account had been discarded, in part because he was wrong on other historical facts, although the bluestones in the monument came from a region of Wales that was considered Irish territory at the time.
Now a vast stone circle created by our Neolithic ancestors has been discovered in Wales with features that suggest that the 12th century legend may not be a complete fantasy.
Its diameter of 110 meters is identical to that of the trench that encloses Stonehenge and is aligned with the summer solstice at sunrise, as is the Wiltshire monument.
A series of buried stone holes have been unearthed that follow the outline of the circle, with shapes that can be linked to the bluestone pillars of Stonehenge. One of them has an imprint at its base that matches the unusual cross section of a blue Stonehenge stone “like a key in a lock,” the archaeologists discovered.
Mike Parker Pearson, Professor of Later British Prehistory at University College London, told The Guardian: “I have been researching Stonehenge for 20 years and this is really the most exciting thing we have come across.”
Evidence supports a centuries-old theory that the nation’s largest prehistoric monument was built in Wales and revered for hundreds of years before being dismantled and dragged to Wiltshire, where it was resurrected as a second-hand monument.
Geoffrey had written about “stones of great magnitude” in his History of the Kings of Great Britain, which popularized the legend of King Arthur, but which is considered both myth and historical fact.
Parker Pearson said there may well be a “little bit” of truth to his account of Stonehenge: “My word, it’s tempting to believe … We may just find what Geoffrey called the Dance of the Giants.”
The discovery will be published in Antiquity, the world’s peer-reviewed journal of archeology, and explored in a documentary on BBC Two on Friday hosted by Professor Alice Roberts.
A century ago, geologist Herbert Thomas established that the stained blue dolerite stones at Stonehenge originated in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokshire where, he suspected, they had originally formed a “revered stone circle.”
The newly discovered circle, one of the largest ever built in Britain, is practically a stone’s throw (3 miles) from the Preseli quarries from which the bluestones were mined before being swept over 140 miles to Salisbury Plain about 5,000 years ago.
In 2015, Parker Pearson’s team discovered a series of nooks and crannies in the rocky outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin with similar stones that prehistoric builders quarried but left behind. The charred hazelnut shells, the charred remains of a Neolithic snack from the bonfires of the quarry workers, were radiocarbon dated to 3,300 BC.
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He convinced Parker Pearson in 2015 that “somewhere near the quarries is the first Stonehenge and that what we are seeing at Stonehenge is a second-hand monument.”
On Thursday he spoke of his eagerness to find the evidence. “How else do you explain that the stones come from a series of quarries 140 miles apart in a straight line, if there is no other kind of relationship?” I just realized that there must surely be a circle of stones. “
For many years, Parker Pearson and his team of professional archaeologists, students, and volunteers explored every conceivable Preseli site on a search for a needle in a haystack.
To see the invisible, they used the most advanced scientific techniques, but were unable to reveal anything in the unyielding ground around a site called Waun Mawn. It still has four monoliths, three now lying. A century ago, the suggestion that they were remains of a stone circle was dropped.
But the theory turned out correct. Parker Pearson refused to give up and turned to proven excavations around those monoliths. “We were lucky because this circle still had four stones left. Had they been taken to Wiltshire we would never have found the stone holes in the circle and I doubt archaeologists would have come across this for centuries to come. “
The acidic soil had destroyed almost all the organic matter that could have been carbon dated. But the traces of ancient sunlight remaining on the ground were analyzed and a probable construction date of around 3300 BC was given, eventually confirming the secret and lost history of Stonehenge.
