The Altar Stone at Stonehenge is a 6 ton sandstone lump of rock that is now thought to have originated in NE Scotland. That is a long way from Salisbury Plain – see https://phys.org/news/2026-06-stonehenge-altar-stone-epic-ancient.html … a new study seeks to follow up on the recent study that claimed the stone could not have been transported by ice. In the new study, ice raft could only have been part of the journey. See https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.70080 … [Journal of Quaternary Science]. The JQS is presumably a geological centred journal rather than an archaeological one. Interesting development. It is another attempt to understand how the stone arrived on Salisbury Plain, some 700 km away – as well as traversing some mountains and difficult terrain. The conclusion is that it could not have been transported by a glacier as the last Ice Age did not glaciate the landscape anywhere near enough and certainly not anywhere near to Salisbury Plain. It must therefore have been moved by humans – although not necessarily all the way from the Torridons, as it could have got some of the way at the head of the nose of a glacier. They conclude that further analysis of the rock is required in order to discover its precise origin point. That may prove difficult for archaeologists. They would also have to establish where the ice might have left it, adrift as you might say. Why people would then transport it from southern Scotland to Stonehenge, as an example. There is the link of pottery between Stonehenge and the Orkneys but the latter isn’t at the moment. the favoured origin point. However, they do suggest the stone may have got as far as Dogger Bank. This was supposed to have been submerged around 6000 to 5000BC. Where was it for the next 2000 years prior to its positioning at Stonehenge. Not only that the authors have not kept up with recent archaeology or geology when it comes to Doggerland. It is now claimed that the southern basin of the North Sea was a refuge for various trees and plants during the Late Glacial Maximum – the maximum extent of the last Ice Age. See https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2508402123 … therefore no glacier could have extended down the North Sea basin during the last Ice Age. Choosing the Dogger Bank in the first place was suspect as nobody can check the idea out as it is submerged – and is the site of a projected wind farm. It may already be covered in them.
The study goes on to suggest the stone was moved in stages -and not all at once. That seems quite a complicated process with no evidence to back it up. Brian John, a former lecturer in geography at Durham University and a former field worker in Antarctica, would disagree. He obtained his degree for a pioneering study of the Ice Age in Pembrokeshire where he was born and where he now lives. He is the author of ‘The Bluestone Enigma‘ 2010, so he has a long history of adherence to the glaciation movement of the bluestones [and presumably the altar stone]. He has written other books and articles and has an active blog at https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com … where you can find his ideas regards the altar stone. See also https://www.tenby-today.co.uk/news/stonehenge-bluestones-the-giant-lost-circle-never-existed-says-new-research-673674 … and https://heritagehunter.co.uk/pembrokeshire-scientist-challenges-stonehenge-bluestones-theory/ … and all three links provide a comprehensive outline of his glacial theories. However, he does not see the altar stone as being moved by ice during the last Ice Age, which is the focus of the new study in PNAS. He suggests it was moved by glacial processes during the Anglian Ice Age. The uniformitarian dating of that is around 450,000 years ago. It could have been sitting on Salisbury Plain for an awful long time. It is called the Anglian as the evidence for it is mostly found in Norfolk, particularly along the coast and its cliffs. There is for example, a huge block of chalk sitting on sediments and seemingly moved at the snout of a glacier. It is so big it dwarfs the altar stone. Powerful forces were abroad. There is also evidence glaciation reached as far as the town of Buckingham where there is a sand quarry, now closed, where you can actually walk into a moraine feature where the stones are carefully graded – large ones at the bottom and smaller and smaller ones towards the top, together with lots of sand and gravel. Some geologists even think it got as far as the chalk escarpment. Or where that escarpment might have been all those thousands of years ago. Somewhere north of where it is now. Hence, the new study confining itself to the last Ice Age seems to have not considered an earlier Ice Age may have moved not just the altar stone but the bluestones too.
In an obituary to Aubrey Burl the author of ‘The Stone Circles of the British Isles’ and various other books and articles on megalithic structures in not just Britain but in Ireland and Brittany too, we learn that he was a long advocate of the glacial transport theory. Mind you he also described himself as a maverick in the archaeological fraternity – see Current World Archaeology 137, June 2026. He is said to have repented shortly before he died, possibly making amends to the archaeological community. However, we should bear in mind that none of these people mention water transport. Rapid melting of the Late Glacial Maximum ice sheet could have shifted the altar stone from wherever glaciation had previously moved it too – as well as a lot of other erratics in southern Britain. We know that ice melt water in northern Europe caused swollen rivers such as the Danube and Don and Volga etc. The Black Sea grew in size in the process and so did the Caspian and the basin in between the two. In North America a similar process occurred in the Ohio-Mississippi river system, pouring torrents of water into the Caribbean. Then there are the Scablands in the Oregon-Washington states region, carved out by massive floods of water that ended up in the Pacific. The key is the rapid nature of the movement of the water – a very powerful process even in a flash flood episode as occurs on and off everywhere around the world. The Linton and Lynmouth flood of 1953, or thereabouts, shifted very large stones – some of them comparable in size to the altar stone, or very close. You can walk along the river and up through the woods towards Linton and see for yourself. Ice Age melt waters would have been even more catastrophic as more water was involved.