How Did They Move the Stones?

Each bluestone weighs up to four tonnes. Moving them from Wales to Wiltshire without wheels or roads is the engineering puzzle that has consumed archaeologists for a century.

One theory is water transport: hauling the stones to the coast, floating them on rafts around the Welsh shore, then up rivers toward Salisbury Plain. The other is a fully overland route, dragging each stone on wooden sledges and rollers. Recent work favors the land route, because the quarries sit on the northern slopes of Preseli — the wrong side for an easy launch out to sea.

A Hidden Ring of Shafts

In 2020, archaeologists found a vast circle of at least 20 shafts, each about 10 metres wide and 5 metres deep, forming a ring more than 2 kilometres across around Durrington Walls. Nothing like it exists anywhere else in Britain.

Dug around 2500 BCE, the shafts may have marked a sacred boundary, hinting that Stonehenge was just one piece of a far larger ritual landscape.