Stonehenge may have originated in Wales
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s claim in a medieval account that Merlin created Stonehenge with megaliths seized from Ireland, has been dismissed as fantasy.
but his 12th-century tale of a transported henge may not be complete conjecture, according to archeologists who have unearthed the site of a stone circle in Wales they believe was dismantled and moved to Salisbury Plain.
Prof. Mike Parker Pearson, project leader at Stones of Stonehenge, believes he has found the site after unearthing a dismantled stone circle at Waun Mawn, in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, which may have formed part of a sacred landscape for western british tribes.
So it may not have been a Neolithic Merlin who moved the monument but people moving eastward and bringing their cultural “crown jewels” with them from ancestral homelands in Wales.
After a decade of work Waun Mawn is now considered a likely point of origin because it lies next to quarries where Stonehenge’s smaller bluestones originate, its perimeter ditch has the same 360ft diameter, and it also aligned with the midsummer solstice sunrise.
DNA and archeological evidence suggests its Neolithic population “vanished” after 3000bc in a migration from what is now Wales into southern england, which could have ended with “political” unity symbolized by Stonehenge.
remains show that the first people buried at Stonehenge came from southern Wales. “They bring the stones because they’re like the crown jewels. They are symbols of who they are,” said Parker Pearson.