‘What is the Stonehenge that Mike Parker Pearson brings us? A Stonehenge of migrants, of people who gathered together to erect remarkable structures.’ A still from the BBC documentary Stonehenge: The Lost Circle Revealed Photograph: Adam Stanford/Aerial-Cam/BBC/PA
Connections between the great neolithic monument of Stonehenge and the hills of west Wales have been observed for centuries. Daniel Defoe, writing in the early 18th century about a stone circle in Pembrokeshire, remarked that it was “very like Stone-henge in Wiltshire”. In 1923, the geologist HH Thomas established beyond doubt that the monument’s smaller, slimmer, inner stones – not to be confused with the heftier outer sarsens with their great lintels – originated in the Welsh Preseli Hills. And 70 years ago, in A Land, her tough-minded, lyrical book about the geology and archaeology of Britain, Jacquetta Hawkes speculated that the bluestones “were broug