Qualla: Bluestonehenge

Bluestonehenge: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Henry Rothwell, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk a mile south-east from Stonehenge along the gentle avenue that runs through the grass, and you will reach the bank of the River Avon at a place called West Amesbury. Stop there. Look down. Underneath the grass is the dismantled outline of another stone circle, a sister to Stonehenge that no one knew existed until 2009. Twenty-seven stoneholes, a 33-foot ring, all the bluestone monoliths long gone. It is called Bluestonehenge, and it changes the story of the most famous monument in Britain.

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Image: Henry Rothwell | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bluestonehenge: Found by accident

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. In August 2008 Mike Parker Pearson and the Stonehenge Riverside Project were digging at the western end of the Stonehenge Avenue, the processional route that links the great stone circle to the river. They returned the following August to extend the trench. What they found, just ...

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Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bluestonehenge: What 'henge' actually means

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Henry Rothwell, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most people picture stones when they hear the word henge, but archaeologists use the term more precisely. A henge is an enclosure of compressed earth with a ditch on the inside of its bank, an inversion that suggests it was built to keep something in, not to keep enemies out. By ...

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Image: Henry Rothwell | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bluestonehenge: Dating a vanished circle

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Henry Rothwell, CC BY-SA 3.0. Radiocarbon dating of antler tools found in the stoneholes gave a date of 2469 to 2286 BCE for when the stones were pulled out and the circle dismantled. The stones themselves were probably raised between about 3000 and 2400 BCE. Two flint chisel arrowheads of a style typical of ...

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Image: Henry Rothwell | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bluestonehenge: Land of the living, domain of the dead

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Henry Rothwell, CC BY-SA 3.0. Parker Pearson had worked in Madagascar with the anthropologist Ramilisonina, who pointed out a pattern common to traditional societies: stone is for ancestors and the dead, wood is for the living. Apply that template to the Stonehenge landscape and a structure emerges. Durringto...

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Image: Henry Rothwell | CC BY-SA 3.0