Rhapsody in blue(stones)
This parson’s egg of a book by an accomplished writer displays insight, but also ignores much recent research and needed some fact-checking
The Stonehenge Bluestones Brian John Greencroft Books 2018 Pb, 256pp, £15.00, ISBN 9780905559940
Brian John, best known for his well-researched and highly readable 18th century Welsh bodice-ripping ‘Angel Mountain Saga’ novels, is an accomplished and successful writer of fiction. Indeed, Martha, his heroine, could front a feminist riposte to Poldark, substituting Pembrokeshire for Cornwall. He also has been a long-standing, often quite lonely, proponent of the theory that glaciers dumped the Stonehenge bluestones close to their present location. This slim paperback is his follow-up to The Bluestone
Enigma (2008) and is a better and more focused book. Mostly, this is due to an extraordinary number of new excavations within Stonehenge and its landscape in the last decade, and to the better characterisation of the rocks of Pembrokeshire that constitute the bluestones. Scores of journal and popular articles have resulted, including a couple from John and coworkers as well as the almost yearly Stonehenge Christmas round-up annual. This output has largely been the work of professional archæologists and of geologists, in particular the two informally known as ‘the pet rock boys’, whose precise identification and provenancing of some of the bluestone orthostats and their debitage resulted in the recognition and excavation of two probable quarry sites at Craig Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog in the northern slopes of the Preseli Hills.
John will have none of this. He critically – very critically – recounts all these endeavours and discusses his counterinterpretations of these pivotal quarry sites. Indeed, most of the book is depressingly negative, countering almost all the research of the 21st century and exploding many (long abandoned) archæological Stonehenge transport ‘myths’. There are too few pages devoted to his own contribution beyond his interpretation of the quarry sites (important, if correct) and frequent mentions of his Preseli ramblings. Discussion of glaciers and their works occupies less than a fifth of the pages of a book whose central premise is that glaciers dumped 40 to 80 random erratics on or near Salisbury Plain.
The evidence for his own theory is slight and includes rumours (unfound rocks in hedges, whispered hints about wells) and discredited antiquarian remarks (lost and found twinned Altar Stones). Blackfoot Native American folk tales are given equal weight to excavation reports and detailed laboratory analyses. ‘Facts’ are used inconsistently; the notable lack of bluestones outside the Stonehenge Landscape (true) is used to argue that bluestones were not special and revered (may well be true), hence it was unlikely they would have been anthropogenically moved from South Wales. In later pages vast numbers of bluestones (1,300+) (untrue and a continued misreading of the literature) from Silbury Hill ‘show’ erratic bluestones were widespread on Salisbury Plain. Why is this important? It is the lack of any undisputed erratics in Salisbury Plain or within its sediments that shreds John’s mono- thesis, making it scientifically extraordinary but not as astonishing as his suggestion that Glastonbury folk [ sic] followed a train of solitary erratics (westwards, north-westwards?) until they ran out of puff and abandoned building Stonehenge. This is moving towards New Age tractor-beam country.
The text is an easy read and was possibly a little too easy to write. One great danger found in self-published books is that there has been no external editorial board to suggest moderating the tone and keeping the text focused, to clear all the copyrights, to check the facts (he has confused the identity of the non-sarsen sandstones throughout the book) and, indeed, check some of the exaggeration; but above all to remind the author to “kill your darlings” (and perhaps in this book be more sparing of the use of bold type for key words and phrases. Random bold type in this sort of book is, like patriotism, a last refuge and never a counter or substitute for good arguments).
Finally, John spends some time discussing the philosophy of ‘evidence’. William of Occam’s razor is honed and Hitchens’s razor (“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”) is sharpened, and waved in the faces of the archæologists, but in the end whose blood is on the tracks? The great irony of this book is that, for most people with any knowledge of Stonehenge, the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age and the glacial history of Britain, Hitchens’s razor demands this book, despite the excellent figures and the passionate text, be set aside, left unread. That would be a pity, for even a false prophet has insights.