Back in August I said I’d make the case for a Clyde-region Altar Stone somewhere with more room in it. This is the room.
Peter’s Altar Stone and mine
Stonehenge’s glacial till?
Artist first. Geology A level a distant third, and that was forty-five years ago. What follows was worked out in conversation with an AI, then checked against the documents. Where the checking ran out, I say so.
It is a reply to Brian John, who picked up my Glacial A303 post, and then answered a question I put to him. His answer changed what I think is worth asking for.
The glacial A303
They complained. Traffic past Stonehenge was glacial, they said, all because drivers slow down for a gawp at the stones. Little did they know. Four hundred and fifty thousand years ago the whole queue might have been sitting under an ice sheet.
Might. Hold on to that word; it does all the work in this post.
So they decided to build a tunnel. Under a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You cannot just dig; you have to check the buried history first. So they dug, and drilled, and augered, and trenched. Seven hundred times.
LIDAR: (c) Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2026, Open Government Licence. Imagery (c) 2026 Google.
The picture above is the whole area under LiDAR, low sun from the north-west, every bump on Salisbury Plain standing to attention. The coloured squares are my gazetteer. Red for the primary records. Blue for trenches where the diggers wrote cold-climate words on their sheets. Grey for a line of auger holes, green for a 2023 evaluation by the visitor centre, purple for a borehole transect, orange for four drilled cores that went off to a laboratory and never came back. All of it lives in a Google Earth file you can spin round yourself. Turn the layers on and off. Fly about. It is the best free toy I have made all year.
I have read the lot. Forty-three public documents, 11,302 pages of borehole logs, trench sheets, laboratory appendices and method statements, put through a scanner with one question: ‘did anybody, anywhere along that road, record anything glacial?’ All from one road scheme, mind; Historic England’s own archive is another trawl for another day. What came back is not proof. Hints. But damn, some of them are suspicious.
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