68 Stonehenge and its Barrows. 



That one so cautious, so careful, and so painstaking in the examina- 

 tion o£ the theories of others, should have committed himself to 

 such an opinion as this, is, to the writer, strange indeed. 



The Geological Charactee of the Stokehenge Stones. 



Dr. Stukeley appears to have been the first to notice the difference 

 between the character of the stones composing the inner and outer 

 circles and ellipses at Stonehenge. He says of the stones of the 

 smaller oval that they are of a much harder sort than those of the 

 lesser circle ; and were brought somewhere from the West ; and of 

 the (so-called) altar-stone, that "^tis akind of blue coarse marble such 

 as comes from Derbyshire, and laid upon tombs in our churches 

 and churchyards." 



Before Aubrey's time there appears to have been a prevalent 

 opinion that the stones were " factitious." ^ To those who were not 

 acquainted with the valleys in the neighbourhood of Marlborough^ 

 these stones would be unlike any with which they were familiar ; 

 and the " composition " of them, where they stand, would get over 

 any difficulty about their transport thither from a distance. The 

 appearance, too, of some of the stones, such as of that which forms 

 an impost of the outer circle towards the north-west, and which in 

 its upper portion was found to consist, for the depth of a few inches, 

 of a conglomerate of flints and sand,^ may have given strength to 

 this opinion. There appear to have been, even recently, according to 

 a paper of Mr. Cunnington's in 1865, some very curious notions about 

 the sarsen portion of the Stonehenge stones. In 1836, the President 

 of the Architectural Society had discovered, "from recent inspection. 



1 The author of a " Fool's Bolt '' strongly asserts their being saxa factitia, as 

 " it was impossible to work them into their several forms. Free-stones may be 

 wrought to any, but these churlish stones to no form in cause of hardness and 

 brittleness." 



'^See Wilts Magazine, \o\. xi., p. 348. Mr. Cunnington adds to this account, 

 the following statement : " Masses of sarsen made up entirely of a similar 

 conglomerate of chalk-flints frequently occur in the neighbourhood of Standen, 

 near Hungerford, but they are not found in the middle or southern districts of 

 Wilts." 



