Did Merlin Steal Stonehenge From the Irish?

According to the 12th-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, he absolutely did. 

But the famed magician of Arthurian legend didn’t do it alone. 

As detailed in The History of the Kings of Britain, the Romano-British king and military leader Aurelius, fresh off a victory against the Anglo-Saxons, wants to build a monument to commemorate the sacrifices made by the “noble patriots” of Kaercaradoc, which will later become known as Salisbury.

Alas, none of the masons or carpenters Aurelius consults feel up to the task, and it is suggested to the king that he seek out “Merlin, the prophet of Vortigern,” as there is no one in the kingdom “of a brighter genius, either in predicting future events, or in mechanical contrivances.”

Shortly thereafter, Merlin would offer the king the following blueprint/prophecy:

“If you are desirous…to honour the burying-place of these men with an ever-lasting monument, send for the Giant’s Dance, which is in Killaraus, a mountain in Ireland. For there is a structure of stones there, which none of this age could raise, without a profound knowledge of the mechanical arts. They are stones of a vast magnitude and wonderful quality; and if they can be placed here, as they are there, round this spot of ground, they will stand for ever.”

Upon hearing this grand plan, the king…laughs in Merlin’s face. “How is it possible to remove such vast stones from so distant a country,” he says, “as if Britain was not furnished with stones fit for the work?”

I mean, it’s a fair question.

Pssst. You can watch a video adaptation of this essay right here. Text continues below.

But Merlin knows something the king doesn’t. And I quote:

“They are mystical stones, and of a medicinal virtue. The giants of old brought them from the farthest coast of Africa, and placed them in Ireland, while they inhabited that country. Their design in this was to make baths in them, when they should be taken with any illness. For their method was to wash the stones, and put their sick into the water, which infallibly cured them. With the like success they cured wounds also, adding only the application of some herbs. There is not a stone there which has not some healing virtue.”

Welp, that convinces him. So King Aurelius sends his brother, Uther Pendragon, perhaps best known as the father of Arthur, to lead fifteen thousand soldiers across the sea to Ireland to steal the stones. Merlin goes on the journey as well.

When this host of marauding Britons arrives, the Irish king Gillomanius is waiting for them with an army of his own. A fierce battle ensues but fortunately for Uther Pendragon, his forces prevail.

They then make their way to the mountain Killaraus and find the Giant’s Dance. And while gazing at this incredible structure Merlin instructs them:

“Now try your forces, young men, and see whether strength or art can do the most towards taking down these stones.”

So the soldiers set up cables and ropes and ladders and now Merlin gets to have a laugh because try as they might, they can’t get those stones to budge. 

The “strength” approach has failed.

So Merlin begins his own “contrivances,” putting in place the “engines” that are necessary, and with this more artful approach he is able to take down the stones with ease.

Merlin then gives the soldiers instructions for carrying the stones back to the ships and loading them on board.

And after the stones are unloaded in Britain, King Aurelius invites all of church leaders in the area to Salisbury where Merlin reconstructs the Giant’s Dance monument, placing the stones “in the same manner as they had been in the mountain Killaraus.”

Et voilà. Stonehenge.

Or so the story goes.

Is There Any Truth to the Giant’s Dance Legend?

Now, this is the part of the essay when I’d usually explain how Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain contains more fantasy than actual history.

And how this story in particular is clearly didactic, i.e., it has a lesson to teach, much like a fable. Our pal Geoffrey even does us the courtesy of reiterating that lesson in the very last line of the story, which is “the prevalence of art above strength.”

Then there’s the fact that Merlin is a composite character, based in part on the 6th-century Welsh figure Myrddin Wyllt, who himself is only quasi-historical with parallels in the Scottish wild man of the woods Lailoken and the Irish wild man of the woods Suibne Geilt—it’s a whole Celtic folklore motif thing.

And of course I could also explain how radiocarbon dating has shown that construction on Stonehenge likely began around 3,000 BCE, thousands of years before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, or the Romans, or the Brittonic/Brythonic-speaking Celts (i.e., the Britons) for that matter, who wouldn’t show up until around 1,000 BCE, which means there’s no way the famed megalithic structure of Salisbury Plain could have been built during the reign of the 5th-century CE Romano-British ruler Aurelius Ambrosius a.k.a. Ambrosius Aurelianus.

And my big takeaway from all of those points would be that the Stonehenge-was-stolen-from-Ireland story is obviously bogus. 

Only here’s the thing:

It might not be.

To quote British archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson: “My word, it’s tempting to believe it… We may well have just found what Geoffrey called the Giants’ Dance,” (source: Irish Times).

Yeah, you heard that correctly: Parker Pearson and his team may have found the original, Irish Stonehenge—or what’s left of it, anyways.

And what’s left is a ring 110 meters (360 feet) in diameter, which just so happens to be the same exact diameter of the enclosing ditch of modern Stonehenge. And yes I’m using the term “modern” here very lightly.

And that ring aligns with the summer solstice sunrise, again, just like modern Stonehenge.

And within that ring the team discovered four bluestone pillars, as well as several holes, the shapes of which can be matched to the shapes of Stonehenge’s bluestone pillars.

One hole in particular features an imprint that lines up so well with a distinctive cross section of a Stonehenge stone pillar that it’s “like a key in a lock.” 

And while the discovery of this ring was certainly exciting, it wasn’t entirely unexpected.

The Road to a Breakthrough Stonehenge Discovery

All the way back in 1923, the British geologist Herbert Thomas established that Stonehenge’s famed spotted dolerite bluestones came from the Preseli hills a.k.a. the Preseli Mountains in Pembrokeshire, a county in southwestern Wales. And even then Thomas suspected those stones had originally been part of a “venerated stone circle” somewhere in that vicinity.

Then in 2015, Parker Pearson and co. discovered some stones of a similar nature that had been extracted but left behind at Craig Rhos-y-felin and Carn Goedog on the northside of the Preseli Mountains. Radiocarbon dating of charred hazelnut shells—the remnants of a prehistoric snack—placed the extraction of those stones at around 3,300 BCE, a few centuries before the construction of Stonehenge.

Then in 2017, that same team would uncover the aforementioned ring at a site known as Waun Mawn (Welsh for “peat moor”), situated only five kilometers (or three miles) from those quarries in the Preseli mountains. 

Their findings were published in the journal Antiquity in 2021.

So, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s “history” to Herbert Thomas’s geology to Mike Parker Pearson’s archaeology, we now have actual evidence that Stonehenge began its “life” as a megalithic monument somewhere other than Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England.

To quote Parker Pearson:

“How else do you explain that the stones come from a series of quarries 140 miles away as the crow flies, if there isn’t some other kind of relationship? It just struck me that surely there has to be a stone circle.”

And now we know that there was one. 

The Giant’s Dance was real.

Ooonly, at this point you might be thinking to yourself:

Wait, that dismantled stone circle they discovered was in Wales, not Ireland. Sooo Geoffrey of Monmouth still got it wrong. 

Very observant of you, dear reader. 

But get this: 

During the period in which Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story is set, the fifth century CE, much of the south-west of Wales, including what is now Pembrokeshire, was part of an Irish kingdom.

Demystifying the Welsh/Irish Kingdom of Dyfed

The Kingdom of Dyfed emerged in the year 410 CE, or thereabouts, following the departure of the Romans from the region.

The Kingdom was founded by the Déisi, a class of Irish people from the Waterford area of Ireland who managed to gain political power in the Early Medieval period.

According to the Kings Cycles of Irish mythology, specifically the medieval Irish narrative The Expulsion of the Déisi, which dates to the 8th century CE, the Déisi were heirs to the High Kingship of Ireland before being expelled from Tara, ancient Ireland’s royal seat of power. 

That same narrative names Eochaid son of Artchorp as the first Déisi settler of the Welsh land called Demed, which would be Latinized as Demetia before morphing into Dyfed, a name that persists to this day as of one of the eight preserved counties of Wales. (They’re used for ceremonial purposes.)

Anyway, the kings of Dyfed allegedly spring from this line, a line that includes Eochaid’s great-grandson Triphun (Welsh: Triffyn Farfog), and terminates in Tualodor mac Rígin (Welsh: Tudor map Regin).

We know these Welsh names because Welsh sources, the Harleian genealogies in particular, corroborate much of what’s detailed in the Irish text—with one glaring exception:

Instead of tracing the aforementioned Triphun back to Eochaid, Harleian traces his lineage back to the Roman Emperor Constantine I.

However, it’s likely that both of these pedigrees were fabricated to an extent—or perhaps embellished is a better word—in an effort to give the line of Dyfed kings an air of royal legitimacy.

Because the historical reality is that before coming to Wales, the Déisi in Ireland were the descendants of unlanded vassals, i.e., they had no royal heritage at all and were ruled over by other clans.

Now, to me that makes the story of their ascent all the more compelling but obviously the scribes writing about them in the Middle Ages didn’t feel the same way.

But the mythologization, if you will, of the Déisi doesn’t rule the historicity of Irish settlers in Wales.

For example, Ogham inscriptions, composed in an early form of the Irish language, have been uncovered in what is now Pembrokeshire.

And both the 9th-century Historia Brittonum (The History of the Britons) and the 10th-century Sanas Cormaic (Cormac’s Glossary) describe the  escapades of a different group of Irish seafarers in Wales, the Uí Liatháin clan. 

Granted, the Uí Liatháin settled in North Wales, although some historians argue the Déisi may have originated as a southern offshoot of this larger colony, a colony that lasted until the mid-5th century.

And speaking of 5th-century Irish invaders in Wales, I’d be remiss not to mention that near the beginning of the 5th century a one Mr. Maewyn Succat was abducted by Irish raiders from a Roman settlement in Wales (according to one reckoning of that settlement’s location, anyway). 

He was then sold into slavery in Ireland, but fortunately was able to escape and thereafter turned his attention toward religious pursuits.

You probably know this Maewyn Succat guy better by his other, adopted name Patrick. Yes, as in Saint Patrick.

Even as recently as a few weeks ago, researchers have uncovered more evidence of tumultuous Celtic activity in Wales, re: the discovery of a “humongous” Roman fort in none other than Pembrokeshire. 

To quote journalist Dalya Alberge, writing for the Guardian:

“The fort is thought to date from the first to the third centuries, when the Celtic Demetae tribe inhabited the south-west area of modern Wales…this fort suggested this part of Wales was considerably more militarised than previously thought.”

Okay, admittedly this isn’t super relevant because what they’re saying here is that the local Brittonic/Brythonic Celts, once believed to be pro-Roman, were actually more hostile to the Romans than previously thought. But still, it’s possible the raiding Gaelic/Goidelic Celts from Ireland were also giving the Romans in this area strife. After all, it’s an area that would eventually come under Irish control.

Until the year 920, that is, when the Kingdom of Dyfed was absorbed into the principality of Deheubarth amidst a period of destabilization brought about by another group of invaders, the Vikings.

Final Thought: Boats and Stones

Did I just go on the longest tangent ever? 

Yes, that’s what I do here.

But the takeaway is this: Geoffrey of Monmouth seems to have had knowledge not only of Stonehenge being a reconstruction of an earlier monument, but also of that monument originally being situated on Irish land—even if that Irish land wasn’t on the island of Ireland.

The mountain Killaraus, home of the Giant’s Dance, isn’t a mythological reference to the Hill of Uisneach in Ireland’s County Westmeath as some have argued, it’s a historical(ish) reference to the Preseli Mountains in Pembrokeshire.

That’s not to say the Irish in Pembrokeshire built that original monument, or that Aurelius Ambrosius ordered its stealing—both the construction and relocation of the monument happened thousands of years before, back in the New Stone Age. 

But clearly the story of its relocation persisted in the local folk memory, or what have you, and Geoffrey of Monmouth was able to tap into it. Either that or the Irish connection to that area in Wales is just a huge coincidence. 

For the sake of this essay, let’s assume it wasn’t a coincidence and let’s finish out by exploring one last little detail that could potentially throw a monkey wrench in Geoffrey’s story:

If Merlin and Uther Pendragon and crew only had to travel to Wales and not Ireland itself to capture the Giant’s Dance, why did they take boats?

And the answer to that question is: look at a map. 

The journey back to Salisbury from Pembrokeshire would have best been facilitated, at least in its first legs, by seafaring.

And wouldn’t you know it, some historians theorize that that is exactly how the Neolithic movers of the monument transported all of those bluestone pillars: by boat.

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Want to learn about the darker side of Irish and Celtic mythology? Check out…

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More the listenin’ type?

I recommend the audiobook Celtic Mythology: Tales of Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes by Philip Freeman (narrated by Gerard Doyle). Use my link to get 3 free months of Audible Premium Plus and you can listen to the full 7.5-hour audiobook for free.