Professors Alice Roberts and Mike Parker Pearson in Wales with the key to a legend about Merlin.
One should never completely dismiss a myth. There is usually a grain of historical truth buried inside. It has just gotten distorted as told and retold over centuries. I feel the same qualified trust about fantasy novels. I know they are imagined, but there is something about them I believe.
In today’s story we find archaeological proof of historical truth underlying an Arthurian legend about the magician Merlin.
As Dalya Alberge writes at the Irish Times, “An ancient myth about Stonehenge, first recorded 900 years ago, tells of the wizard Merlin leading men to Ireland to capture a magical stone circle called the Giants’ Dance and rebuilding it in western England as a memorial to the dead.
“Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account had been dismissed, partly because he was wrong on other historical facts, although the bluestones of the monument came from a region of Wales that was considered Irish territory in his day.
“Now a vast stone circle created by our Neolithic ancestors has been discovered in Wales with features suggesting that the 12th-century legend may not be complete fantasy. Its diameter of [120 yards] is identical to the ditch that encloses Stonehenge, and it is aligned on the midsummer solstice sunrise, just like the Wiltshire monument.
“A series of buried stone holes that follow the circle’s outline has been unearthed, with shapes that can be linked to Stonehenge’s bluestone pillars. One of them bears an imprint in its base that matches the unusual cross section of a Stonehenge bluestone ‘like a key in a lock,’ the archaeologists discovered.
“Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British later prehistory at University College London, says:
‘I’ve been researching Stonehenge for 20 years now, and this really is the most exciting thing we’ve ever found.’
“The evidence backs a century-old theory that the great prehistoric monument was built in Wales and venerated for hundreds of years before being dismantled and dragged to Wiltshire, where it was resurrected as a second-hand monument.
“Geoffrey had written of ‘stones of a vast magnitude’ in his History of the Kings of Britain, which popularised the legend of King Arthur but is considered as much myth as historical fact. … The discovery will be published in Antiquity, the peer-reviewed journal of world archaeology, and explored in a documentary on BBC Two on [presented] by Prof Alice Roberts.
“A century ago the geologist Herbert Thomas established that the spotted dolerite bluestones at Stonehenge originated in the Preseli hills of Pembrokeshire [Wales] where, he suspected, they had originally formed a ‘venerated stone circle.’ The newly discovered circle – one of the largest ever constructed in Britain – is about 5km from the Preseli quarries from which the bluestones were extracted before being dragged more than 225km to Salisbury Plain some 5,000 years ago.
“In 2015 Parker Pearson’s team discovered a series of recesses in the outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin with similar stones that the prehistoric builders extracted but left behind … quarried almost four centuries before Stonehenge was constructed.
“It convinced Parker Pearson in 2015 that ‘somewhere near the quarries there is the first Stonehenge and that what we’re seeing at Stonehenge is a second-hand monument.’ “
At the Irish Times, here, you can learn how the archaeologists managed to carbon-date the circle despite the destructive effects of acidic soil.
James J. Hackett, storyteller and harness maker, Moate, Ireland, 1937-2017. Seen here visiting his Kelly cousins in Rhode Island.
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