From Never Yet Melted
The Guardian reports on an interesting new discovery concerning Stonehenge.
An ancient myth about Stonehenge, first recorded
900 years ago, tells of the wizard Merlin leading men to Ireland to capture a
magical stone circle called the Giants’ Dance and rebuilding it in England as a
memorial to the dead.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account had been dismissed,
partly because he was wrong on other historical facts, although the bluestones
of the monument came from a region of Wales that was considered Irish territory
in his day.
Now a vast stone circle created by our Neolithic
ancestors has been discovered in Wales with features suggesting that the
12th-century legend may not be complete fantasy.
Its diameter of 110 metres is identical to the
ditch that encloses Stonehenge and it is aligned on the midsummer solstice
sunrise, just like the Wiltshire monument.
A series of buried stone-holes that follow the
circle’s outline has been unearthed, with shapes that can be linked to
Stonehenge’s bluestone pillars. One of them bears an imprint in its base that
matches the unusual cross-section of a Stonehenge bluestone “like a key in a
lock”, the archaeologists discovered.
Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British later
prehistory at University College London, told the Guardian: “I’ve been researching
Stonehenge for 20 years now and this really is the most exciting thing we’ve
ever found.”
The evidence backs a century-old theory that the
nation’s greatest prehistoric monument was built in Wales and venerated for
hundreds of years before being dismantled and dragged to Wiltshire, where it
was resurrected as a second-hand monument.
Geoffrey had written of “stones of a vast
magnitude” in his History of the Kings of Britain, which popularised the legend
of King Arthur, but which is considered as much myth as historical fact.
Parker Pearson said there may well be a “tiny
grain” of truth in his account of Stonehenge: “My word, it’s tempting to
believe it … We may well have just found what Geoffrey called the Giants’
Dance.”
The discovery will be published in Antiquity, the peer-reviewed journal of world
archaeology, and explored in a documentary on BBC Two on Friday presented by
Prof Alice Roberts
https://neveryetmelted.com/2021/02/15/stonehenge-moved-from-wales-and-rebuilt/
Those who dressed up like
(supposed) Britons and Druids and discovered magnetic waves and historic
vibrations when visiting Stonehenge at various Solstices I always thought at
least a little bit off. If the stones were stolen in Wales, the neo-Druids and Britons now seem even more nuts.
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