The bluestone monoliths of Stonehenge did not come from a "giant lost circle" at Waun Mawn in Pembrokeshire’s Preseli hills. This is the conclusion reached by a local expert who says that there is "too much fantasy and too little evidence" in the theory.

A popular claim is that around 5,000 years ago, scores of bluestones were incorporated into a massive stone setting at Waun Mawn, a bleak moorland hillside in the Preseli mountains. The stones were later dismantled by our Neolithic ancestors and moved cross-country to be reassembled on the chalklands of Salisbury Plain.

Dr Brian John lives just three kilometres away from the site in question. He is a retired geomorphologist and university lecturer who has published widely on the landscapes of the polar regions and on the glaciation of Wales. He even has a glacier in Antarctica named after him in recognition of his contributions to polar research.

In a recently published paper, Dr John has examined the evidence associated with Waun Mawn stone circle claims. He says that the field evidence does not withstand scrutiny.

Neither does he find any evidence to support the narrative of bluestone quarrying, temporary placement at Waun Mawn and then human transport to Stonehenge.

The hypothesis disputed by Dr John has been developed over the past decade by Professor Mike Parker Pearson of University College London and a team of archaeologists and geologists.

Their findings have been published in the journal Antiquity and were the subject of a popular BBC programme in 2021 which stated that a circle of 30-50 stones had been quarried nearby and stood at Waun Mawn before being carried off to Stonehenge.

Dr John says that at present there is only one standing stone on the Waun Mawn site, with three recumbent stones in a rough alignment.

He states that it is "fanciful in the extreme" to interpret this rough stone setting as the last remnant of one of the biggest stone circles in the British Isles.

Dr John has examined most of the supposed empty ‘stone sockets’ and concludes that they are entirely natural pits and hollows in a surface of undulating glacial and periglacial deposits and finds no evidence of a circular arrangement.

Western Telegraph: Waun Mawr was not the site of a giant lost stone circle, says Dr John

He also disputes the idea that monoliths of rhyolite and spotted dolerite from the supposed "quarries" of Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog were brought to Waun Mawn, and sees no evidence that these stones were deemed sacred or special in any way.

He says that all of the stones currently found at Waun Mawn have come from local outcrops of rock and from a scatter of glacial erratics. He also disputes the idea that one of the stone sockets was a precise ‘fit’ for one of the standing bluestones at Stonehenge.

“The conclusion must be that Waun Mawn had nothing at all to do with Stonehenge,” said Dr John.

“There were no stone quarries in the vicinity, and there was no lost stone circle.

In the newly published article Dr John points out that in the Neolithic and Bronze Age landscape of West Wales there is no evidence of spotted dolerite and rhyolite bluestones being used preferentially in megalithic structures.

He also notes that in their latest publications Prof Parker Pearson and his team have accepted that many of their assumptions about bluestone extraction and use in West Wales need to be revised.

“Unfortunately, the archaeologists have been swayed by the false premise that the Stonehenge bluestones (from many different sources) cannot possibly have been transported by glacier ice,” said Dr John.

“On that basis they have developed a highly complicated ruling hypothesis of bluestone extraction and use whilst ignoring the very flimsy nature of their own evidence.”

The paper in full has been published in the international “Holocene” journal and can be read in full at www.researchgate.net/publication/379121966_The_Stonehenge_bluestones_did_not_come_from_Waun_Mawn_in_West_Wales