#sarsen

June 8, 2026:

Honeydew Tertiary, Snapper, Pharaoh.

A model of Stonehenge showing how it is thought to have looked when complete (if it was ever completed but that's another conversation) The big stones are the sarsens and the small ones are the bluestones. The geology of the rocks at Stonehenge is a huge subject and some research is still ongoing. I can tell you that the big stones, the ones most people think of when they imagine Stonehenge, are called sarsens, a local name. Sarsens appear in "drifts" on the chalk land that underlies that part of England. The sarsens are a kind of sandstone with a high amount of silica in them so if you find a newly broken or cut one it will have shiny bits in it. But of course the ones at Stonehenge were cut and shaped long ago and are covered with lichens and a dull patina. Until recently the source of the sarsens wasn't certain, although they knew they weren't from far away, but not that long ago the son of an engineer who had extracted a core from one of them long ago returned that core to English Heritage who are in charge of the stones. The core was tested and analyzed and it was determined that almost all of the 52 sarsens at Stonehenge were brought from an area called West Woods near Marlborough, about 15 miles north. Quite an enterprise 4500 years ago even to bring one 20 ton stone that far and they brought 50+. But the big stones aren't even one third of the stones at Stonehenge and the rest of the story is much more complex. People toss around the term bluestone for many of the smaller stones at Stonehenge but that isn't a geological term and the bluestones are different kinds of stone, mostly rhyolite and spotted dolerite. The closest geological matches for many of these are in outcroppings in western Wales. How they got to Salisbury Plain is contested. Most theorists believe they were brought there for some reason through enormous effort by the builders but there's one fellow in particular who bangs on and on about them having been brought from Wales by glaciers. I find myself hoping he's wrong just because he is unkind about other researchers and well, just generally annoying, but that's no way to do science, haha, and until proof is found one way or another we don't actually know.

From Reptil #004

Art by Enid Balám, Victor Olazaba and Carlos Lopez