The stones that came from Wales

Everyone knows Stonehenge is old and mysterious, but here is the bit that really gets me. The smaller inner stones, the bluestones, did not come from anywhere nearby. They came from the Preseli Hills in Wales, about 150 miles away. Neolithic people quarried them and hauled them all that distance, each weighing several tonnes, some five thousand years ago, and to this day nobody can say how they did it. It is genuinely the biggest unanswered question in British prehistory.

And then there is the legend. Back in the 1130s, a writer called Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed the wizard Merlin had used magic to carry the stones to Salisbury Plain from the far west of the country. For centuries that was filed under nonsense. But recently archaeologists dug at Waun Mawn, up in those same Welsh hills, and found the traces of an older stone circle that had been taken apart and removed, its stones carried off somewhere. A medieval tale about stones brought from the west, and a real dismantled circle in just the right place. I do love it when a legend turns out to be hiding a splinter of truth.

I painted it in watercolour and ink, the stones against a wide Wiltshire sky. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Stonehenge, Wiltshire · Travel Poster