Stonehenge’s Oldest Rocks Moved 160 Miles, Say British Geologists

by Bill Davenport December 25, 2011

Wired UK‘s Mark Brown reports that a team of British geologists have pinpointed the site of the quarry from which Stonehenge’s eponymous stones were transported. Robert Ixer of the University of Leicester and Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales painstakingly matched samples of rhyolite from various rock outcrops in Pembrokeshire, Wales with the stones of the oldest, inner circle at the famous neolithic monument, finding a match at a 65-metre-long outcropping called Craig Rhos-y-Felin, near Pont Saeson in north Pembrokeshire, approximately 160 miles from Stonehenge. The larger, more visible sarsens of the monuments outer ring are several centuries newer, and came froma different site somewhere in the Marlborough Downs, 20 miles north of Stonehenge.

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