Six tonnes of sandstone sit at the center of Stonehenge, and a Journal of Quaternary Science paper now places the quarry for that block in northeast Scotland, about 700 km from Salisbury Plain. The same paper tests whether an Ice Age glacier could have shifted the Altar Stone toward England, and its answer is narrower than a straight ride south: ice may have taken the block to Dogger Bank in what is now the North Sea, and no farther.
That leaves roughly 400 km of the journey that people, not glaciers, would have had to cover.
An origin about 700 km from the monument
The study, titled “From Highlands to henge,” was co-led by Dr. Remy Veness of Sheffield Hallam University and Dr. Anthony Clarke of Curtin University in Australia, with colleagues from the University of Sheffield, Wessex Archaeology and the University of Bristol. According to the Sheffield Hallam release, the Altar Stone came from the Orcadian Basin of northeast Scotland, specifically the Caithness or Inverness-Black Isle areas of that basin, as the paper puts it. The paper gives the distance from there to Stonehenge as approximately 700 km, or 435 miles.
The Scottish source itself was established in 2024, when mineral dating overturned the older assumption that the block came from Wales, as Smithsonian Magazine recounts. The new work is about the route, not the origin.
Ice-flow modelling and the Dogger Bank limit
The team combined mineral analysis, geological sourcing and computer models of the last British ice sheet. Those models show glacial dispersal from the Scottish source regions moving boulders north, east and southeast. The paper concludes that the most plausible glacial pathway would carry the Altar Stone only as far as Dogger Bank, a landmass that was exposed between roughly 23,000 and 8,000 years before the present and is now underwater, according to the same paper. Ice never reached southern England, so it cannot account for the final placement.
Even the Dogger Bank leg carries a hedge. Smithsonian reports that Dogger Bank was flooded about 8,000 years ago, roughly 3,000 years before work at Stonehenge began, so a stone left there by ice would have needed to be recovered and kept for millennia. The authors describe that as requiring an increasingly elaborate set of circumstances, and the paper words its own conclusion carefully: glacial transport may have provided an intermediate stage, but alone cannot account for the stone’s emplacement on Salisbury Plain.
People for the remaining distance
The study puts human effort in charge of everything after Dogger Bank. Science Focus reports that Neolithic people would have had to move the stone about 400 km overland, along coastal routes and by river to reach Salisbury Plain. The paper names the Berkshire Ridgeway, described in the Sheffield Hallam material as regarded as the oldest road in Europe, as an important corridor toward Salisbury Plain.
Clarke said that, rather than being carried naturally by ice, the evidence points to a deliberate, carefully planned movement across a challenging and varied landscape. He added that moving a stone of this size over such a distance would have required planning, coordination and a deep understanding of the landscape, according to Sci.News, which quotes him describing a level of organization and cooperation among Neolithic communities not previously fully appreciated.
Two distances that should not be merged
The distinction between the two distances matters for how the story should be read. Seven hundred kilometers describes where the stone started relative to the monument. It does not describe how far any glacier moved it. Ice, in the study’s modelling, handles at most the first stretch, from the Scottish source to the edge of the North Sea basin, and people handle the rest.
Veness has floated a further idea. The same Sheffield Hallam material notes that Neolithic communities may have valued the stone enough to relocate it twice, possibly moving it from Dogger Bank to escape rising seas before it was finally set up at Stonehenge. Science Focus attaches a related remark to Veness, that the people of Doggerland may have attached cultural significance to the Altar Stone long before it was incorporated into Stonehenge.
The paper was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science on June 4, 2026, under the DOI 10.1002/jqs.70080, and later write-ups of it, including one dated September 22, simply repackage that record. Whether any boulder from the Orcadian Basin actually came to rest at Dogger Bank is something ice-flow modelling can show to be possible but cannot confirm, which is why the paper keeps the glacier leg conditional. The human leg, by contrast, is the part Clarke and Veness treat as unavoidable, since no ice sheet extended far enough south to finish the job.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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