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
Different special
Partisan. Say it up front. I think ice moved the big stones of Britain about and people stood them up, and I thought so before the geology got interesting. So read what follows as a man with a side and a map.
The occasion is a new paper on the Devil’s Arrows, the Millstone Grit monoliths beside the A1 at Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire. Put up something like 4,000 years ago (BC 2,000). The paper matches their zircons to Brimham Rocks, a crag 18 km west, and concludes that Bronze Age people picked that crag on purpose and dragged the stones eleven miles to a spot with no gritstone of its own. Deliberate sourcing. The word is in the title.
Anyone but boring old nature
Nobody has ever wanted the boring answer. Nine hundred years of people explaining how the stones got onto Salisbury Plain, every one of them with a better version than the last, and not one of those versions has ever been “the ice put it there.”
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