The Boles Barrow bluestone: a 400 kg exotic, and every broken link to the barrow

A boulder of Preseli spotted dolerite in Salisbury Museum is said to have come from Boles Barrow, a long barrow on Salisbury Plain whose burials date to before 3600 BC. Stonehenge's first bluestones were set up about 3000 BC. If the boulder was buried in the barrow, bluestone was on the Plain centuries earlier, and it has been cited since 1991 as evidence that glaciers, not people, carried the bluestones east. The case for Boles Barrow is not in the ground but in the archive, and every link in it breaks. 1801: William Cunnington digs the barrow. His letter lists stones "from about 28lbs. to 200 lbs." and no bluestone; Colt Hoare's 1812 account has none either. Too big: those stones weighed 13 to 91 kg and were "often found peeping out from the turf" (Wyndham, 1802). The boulder weighs around 400 kg. The note: an undated footnote in Cunnington's hand, "Since writing the above I discover among them the Blue hard Stone also …", first printed in 1922. It gives no size. 1923: the boulder is matched to the note 122 years after the dig, at Heytesbury House, where it had been called "the Stonehenge Stone". A change of mind: a Boles Barrow origin was "highly probable" in 2015; by 2020 it "cannot be the Boles Barrow stone". The British Museum (2022): "Boles Barrow or Stonehenge". Amesbury 16: where Colt Hoare did find bluestone, in a Bronze Age round barrow later than Stonehenge. On the same page he recorded pieces "now daily knocked off" Stonehenge. More likely obtained from Stonehenge, by whom and when unknown. If so, it is no evidence that ice carried bluestones to Salisbury Plain. Sources and notes: https://www.sarsen.org/boles Sources: W. Cunnington, letter to H. P. Wyndham, 18 July 1801, and note; H. P. Wyndham to R. Colt Hoare, 1802: printed in B. H. Cunnington, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 41 (1922), 172–174, and 42 (1924), 431–437. R. Colt Hoare, The Ancient History of Wiltshire, vol. I (1812), pp. 87–88, 127. M. Parker Pearson et al., Antiquity 89 (2015). M. Parker Pearson & C. Richards, "The Stonehenge bluestones", in M. Parker Pearson et al., Stonehenge for the Ancestors, Part 1 (Sidestone, 2020), p. 174. https://doi.org/10.59641/x8a4u5v6w7 British Museum, The world of Stonehenge (2022), label and large-print guide p. 38; Salisbury Museum, SBYWM:1934.68. R. S. Thorpe et al., Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 57 (1991); O. Williams-Thorpe & R. S. Thorpe, Proceedings of the British Academy 77 (1992), 133–161. The Past / Current Archaeology, "Re-excavating Boles Barrow", 27 May 2023. https://the-past.com/news/the-latest-... Photographs: T. Daw (British Museum 2022; Salisbury Museum 2012, 2016; Colt Hoare pages). Map: contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. LiDAR: contains Environment Agency data, OGL v3.0. Music: original. #Stonehenge #Archaeology #Wiltshire #Geology