A WELSH BARD IN WILTSHIRE: IOLO MORGANWG, SILBURY AND THE SARSENS 85 
Avebury itself sarsens generally could be discerned 
lying in rings and rows. The achievements of 
Stukeley and Aubrey can be seen in their original 
context as acts of classification and analysis as 
much as of outright discovery, distinguishing the 
artificial from the natural in a landscape filled with 
stones set in apparent patterns. 
Though these ideas had gained wide acceptance 
by the latter half of the eighteenth century, Iolo’s 
perception of human design across the entire 
landscape is far from inexplicable or perverse, and 
he was certainly not alone in interpreting the 
sarsens of the Marlborough Downs as one vast 
ancient monument. Indeed, modern archaeology 
would not disagree with him: the known extent of 
the grid of fields laid out on the Downs in the 
Bronze Age, and the scale and variety of the 
monuments still being identified in the Avebury 
landscape, all tend to confirm his point of view. 
Given his belief that all the stones came from 
elsewhere (‘whence such amazing numbers of 
stones were got, or how brought thither, is 
astonishing to think’), it becomes clearer why this 
letter, rather surprisingly, pays scant attention to 
Avebury itself. If the entire area is perceived as a 
major ‘Druidical monument’ or complex of 
monuments, then Avebury would appear 
correspondingly diminished. It may also be that its 
central importance is taken for granted, or, more 
simply, that Iolo did not have the time or 
opportunity for a proper visit. 
Iolo’s belief that the sarsens originate outside 
the area naturally leads him to reject the ‘late 
author’ who ‘asserts the stones of stonehenge were 
got’ from the Marlborough Downs. This idea was 
fairly widespread, appearing in the writings of 
Inigo Jones, Aubrey and Pepys, but it was most 
influentially put forward by William Stukeley (who 
died in 1765), and he is the likely target here. 
Elsewhere in Iolo’s manuscripts the rejection of 
Stukeley is made explicit, though in a manner 
which seems curiously wilful, not to say unfair, 
since Iolo himself appears to have changed his 
mind about the origins of the sarsens, and is here 
much more in line with Stukeley’s thinking: 
These masses of Granite are to be found in 
abundance on Marlborough downs, where they are 
called the Greyweathers, in many places on the surface 
of Salisbury plains, and almost every where there at 
no great depth in the ground amongst that 
prodigious heap of volcanic or deluvian rubbish of 
which all that part of this Island for fifty miles at least 
around, consists [...] Dr Stukely in his attempt to 
discover the quarry whence the materials of Stone- 
henge came had the misfortune to jabber a profusion 
of pedantic nonsense (NLW MS 13089, 172). 
In another note he adds ‘stones like those of 
Stonehenge are found in great numbers on the 
surface of the ground of various magnitudes 
perhaps since the Creation, especially about Abury, 
the Grey weathers etc’? (NLW MS 13097B, 331). 
Since Stukeley explicitly claimed that ‘All our 
Druid temples are built, where these sort of stones 
from the surface can be had at reasonable distances; 
for they are never taken from quarries’ (Stukeley 
1740, 5), it is hard to see what Iolo’s quarrel with 
him is here. It may be that we lack some key piece of 
contextual information that would help us 
understand the nature of his disagreement. 
FROM WILTSHIRE TO 
GLAMORGAN 
Though Iolo walked the route from London to 
Bristol many times throughout his life, his 
manuscripts and correspondence reveal 
disappointingly little else on the Wiltshire sites: 
this early letter seems to be the fullest account of 
them to survive. Yet there is no doubting that the 
prehistoric monuments helped give shape to the 
various rituals of Iolo’s bardic tradition, many of 
which crystallized during another period in 
London in the early 1790s. Iolo’s bardism saturates 
the introduction to William Owen Pughe’s Heroic 
Elegies of Llyware Hen (1792), and inspired him to 
produce several watercolours on druidic themes; in 
the same year Iolo held the first Gorsedd or bardic 
ceremony on Primrose Hill. And when his own 
Poems, Lyric and Pastoral came out in 1794, its 
footnotes and essays were full of information about 
bards past and present, including this nicely scaled- 
down and portable version of the stone circle: 
The Welsh Bards always meet in the open air whilst 
the Sun is above the horizon, where they form a circle 
of stones, according to the ancient custom; this circle 
they call Cylch Cyngrair, the Circle of Concord, or of 
Confederation. In these days, however, it is formed 
only of a few very small stones, or pebbles, such as 
may be carried to the spot in one man’s pocket; but 
this would not have been deemed sufficient by those 
who formed the stupendous Bardic Circle of Stone- 
Henge (Williams 1794, IT, 39). 
