This is the longest known journey for any stone used in a Neolithic monument.
No one is certain why Stonehenge was built. This world-famous monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire is thought to commemorate the dead, and is aligned with movements of the Sun and Moon.
Lying flat at the heart of Stonehenge, the six-tonne, five-metre-long rectangular Altar Stone is a grey-green sandstone, far bigger and different in its composition from the other bluestones. So where did it come from? The smaller, exotic bluestones are a different story. Not local to Stonehenge, they weigh typically 1-3 tonnes and are up to 2.5 metres tall. The Altar Stone, also not local, is twice the size of the biggest other bluestone. It is not known when it arrived at Stonehenge, nor if it ever stood upright.
Initially, the Altar Stone’s origin was now suggested to be in western Wales, near Milford Haven. But at the end of the 2010s, we further subjected its fragments to a variety of geological analyses. These results hinted at eastern Wales or the Welsh borders as its source, and discounted the west Wales origin.
Sediment grains in the Altar Stone are cemented together by the mineral baryte, giving it an unusual chemical composition that’s high in the element barium. A few museum fragments were identical to the Altar Stone – proving that a labelled fragment removed from the Altar Stone in 1844 was genuine was crucial. These few, precious fragments could be used for our study, so we didn’t need to collect new samples directly from the Altar Stone.
Our new study published in Nature shows that the Altar Stone’s age fingerprint identifies it as coming from the Orcadian Basin in north-east Scotland. The findings of this age dating are truly astonishing, overturning what had been thought for a century.
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