henge

The stones and their journeys

The sarsens — Established

• About 30 uprights of the outer circle with a continuous lintel ring; five trilithons in the inner horseshoe, graded toward the Great Trilithon. Silcrete (“sarsen”), dressed hard on the inward and processional faces.
• Provenance: West Woods, Marlborough Downs, ~25 km north — Nash et al. 2020, Science Advances 6:eabc0133, geochemical match of 50 of the 52 surviving sarsens against the core drilled from Stone 58.
• Deeper petrology, weathering behaviour and lichen cover are worked through in research/sarsen-geology.md — audited, tiered, and deliberately not yet applied to the renderer, per the owner.

The bluestones — Established

• The smaller stones of the circle and horseshoe: dolerites, rhyolites and tuffs from the Preseli Hills, west Wales, ~250 km away; specific outcrops identified at Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin (Bevins, Ixer and colleagues, 2010s), with excavated Neolithic quarrying traces (Parker Pearson et al.).

The Altar Stone came from Scotland — Established, 2024

Primary: Clarke et al., “A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge”, Nature 632, 570–575 (14 August 2024), doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07652-1. News summary: Gaind & Smith, Nature 632, 484–485 (2024), doi:10.1038/d41586-024-02584-2 — the article behind the owner’s reference photograph.

• The Altar Stone — the six-tonne greenish sandstone slab lying at the monument’s heart — is not from Wales as long assumed. U–Pb and Lu–Hf dating of its detrital zircon, apatite and rutile grains fingerprints the Orcadian Basin of north-east Scotland, at least 750 km away (the news piece says “hauled 800 kilometres”).
• Implication carried by the paper’s authors: long-range Neolithic transport — likely by sea — and a degree of connectivity across Britain not previously credited for c. 2500 BC.
• In the app the Altar Stone lies recumbent at the heart of the setting; its lore note should carry this finding and its citation.

Construction sequence — Established, coarse

• c. 2900 BC: earthwork enclosure and (probably) the Aubrey ring.
• c. 2600–2400 BC: the sarsen circle and trilithons; bluestones rearranged repeatedly over the following centuries.
• The app’s two states are deliberate poles: as it was (the complete sarsen monument, c. 2200 BC) and as it stands (the surveyed ruin). Everything between is real archaeology the app does not yet attempt.

Medieval reception — Established as historiography

From the Nature news piece: Henry of Huntingdon (twelfth century) counted it among the wonders of England; legend gave the building to Merlin. The lore panel may quote this as historiography, never as history.

A popular infographic — cited, not reproduced

Source: “Infographics of the construction process of the megalithic monument of cromlech at Stonehenge (England)”, Alamy stock image 2NEC3YA (contributor-owned, commercially licensed; fetched as a PDF listing 2026-07-31, at the owner’s direction). The artwork itself is copyrighted stock material and is not vendored or reproduced anywhere in this repo — only its factual claims are recorded here, cited to their source, the way any secondary reference is treated.

What it shows, general-audience quality, English-as-a-second-language phrasing throughout — treat as Speculative/Debated unless a claim is independently corroborated:

• Etymology panel: “megalithic” from Greek megas (big) + lithos (stone); “cromlech” as stone + circular monument — Established, ordinary etymology.
• First-phase panel: circular ditch, two original accesses, 110 m diameter, livestock bone deposits in the ditch fill, only one causeway still open today — all corroborated by our own established figure (Cleal et al., see the earthwork page) and by Earthwork.swift’s modelled single fully-open axis causeway.
• Third-phase panel: the central structure “surrounded by two rings made of holes, consisting of two horseshoes and two circles of megalithic [stones]” — matches our sarsen/bluestone circle-and- horseshoe model. Labels the Altar Stone and a stone it calls the “Stone of the sacrifice.”
• Labels “Hole Y” and “Hole Z” on a ring outside the sarsen circle — these correspond to the real Y and Z holes, a genuine excavated ring of pits from a much later phase (c. 1600 BC), and are not yet modelled in this app. A legitimate gap to add, separate from the two claims below.

Two claims from this source are flagged, not carried into the app:

• “166” as the stone count of the original construction. This number does not match any figure in our established sources (the sarsen count, bluestone count, or any published total we’ve found) and is not corroborated elsewhere. Recorded here as what the source says; not repeated as fact.
• “Stone of the sacrifice.” Almost certainly this source’s gloss on the Slaughter Stone — the fallen sarsen at the north-east entrance, a name coined by antiquarian observers (its surface iron staining was once read as blood) with no excavated evidence of sacrifice ever performed there. Scene.swift’s own comment already says as much: “nothing was slaughtered on it.” If this label is ever shown in-app, it needs the correction attached, not the euphemism alone.