Indiana James and the Mystery of the Lost Circle

G - James being his surname - has been more than patient waiting around while I take photo after photo, so today it is my turn to indulge the explorer in him. He wants to find the Lost Circle, subject of the recent BBC documentary and part of the enduring myth of how the smaller outer stones of Stonehenge originated in Pembrokeshire’s Preseli Hills. 


Back in the distant, dusty days of school history, I remember the story of massive bluestones miraculously transported from Wales to Salisbury Plain. But why? According to Jacquetta Hawkes it was ‘because in Wales they had already absorbed holiness from their use in some other sacred structure”. Clearly our mystic powers go back a long way. 

And so it is that we find ourselves roaming around remote and rugged moorland looking for the remnants of that great Welsh stone circle, Waun Mawn - once, some 5,000 years ago, 110m in diameter, the third largest in the British Isles. At least we have sun, even though it is bitterly cold. 

G clutches his Garmin, a puzzled expression on his face. The land is largely featureless, though a stone circle is marked on the map. Then we spot a few toppled stones and one remaining monolith standing some 1.6 metres high. It’s hard not to feel some disappointment, but there is a sacred magic here nonetheless. 

He had hoped for evidence of archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson’s dig - the sockets where the stones were once positioned in a great circle, before each boulder, weighing between two and five tonnes apiece, was transported 150 miles to Salisbury Plain, in a 5,000-year-old feat of engineering almost beyond imagining.

But of course, no evidence remains, the socket holes carefully refilled and left for future generations to discover new answers for themselves. 

Hawkes wrote: “Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves – or desires.” Our quest has been a small one, but we’ve been driven on by that same primal need to reach out and touch a mystical past beyond our understanding. 

Belatedly, I’ve decided to tag this for Derelict Sunday - a derelict stone circle 5,000 years old, this stone the last survivor standing. 

‘Stonehenge: the  Lost Circle Revealed’ is available on BBC iPlayer