Stonehenge Deciphered: A Critical Reading of Geometry, Landscape, and Intention by Alun G. Rees (2025)
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Welcome to Stone Temple Gardening where we dig deep into the rich earth of prehistory to cultivate new understandings of the past!
Today's post: Stonehenge Deciphered: A book review.
There is a link to purchase the book in paperback and kindle versions at the end of the review.
Also a forthcoming in-depth interview with the author on my Stone Temple Gardening You Tube channel.
Biography
Alun Rees had a long, award-winning career in national journalism, covering conflicts including the Gulf War, as well as high-profile crimes such as the Yorkshire Ripper, the Hungerford massacre, and the Dunblane school shooting. He also conducted the only prison interview with serial killer Rose West. In addition, he worked as a ghostwriter for former SAS and SEAL Team Six operatives on several military non-fiction books, including three bestsellers published in the UK and the USA.
However, his abiding passion over the years has been the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age of Britain. As an emerging historian, he wrote many pieces on Stonehenge for the Mail on Sunday and other outlets, and played a key role in the campaign to preserve and display the remarkable Bush Barrow collection at the Wiltshire Museum.
His first published work of historical non-fiction, The Book of Sticks: Ancient & Modern, examines the pivotal role of the humble stick in human evolution, from hunting, warfare, surveying, and construction, to symbols of religion and high office, as well as more esoteric uses such as the magic wand and the witches’ broom.
A native of Wales, he says Celtic folklore and legend are part of his DNA, and he is an expert on the Druid religion. His next book, Stonehenge and the Druids, draws on that expertise and includes a detailed exposition of what he describes as the quantum beliefs of the Druids. When not writing, he teaches an online course in Lectofabology, the analysis of myths, legends, and fables.
Alun lives near Marlborough in Wiltshire, close to the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage landscape, and frequents the many stone temples of the area on an almost daily basis.
His partner is an American academic, and he has three adult children: a publisher, an author, and a traditional blacksmith. Alun likes nothing better than walking the ancient paths of Britain with his spaniels, while dreaming of Preseli.
Stonehenge Deciphered
There are many books about Stonehenge, and most follow familiar lines of thought, returning to the same rutted chalk contours where the last bright flints of insight were prised out long ago. Others pause, reframe the question, and recover a narrative that restores people to the picture — their journeys, choices, and beliefs embedded within the stones themselves. Alun G. Rees’s Stonehenge Deciphered belongs to the latter.
It neither trudges through catalogues of data in the inert style favoured by some archaeological writing, nor embellishes the past with tales of lost civilisations and earth energies; rather, it draws together evidence long scattered across trenches, archives, and the laboratories of modern science to form a coherent and persuasive pattern. One senses the work of a mind both sceptical and enchanted, a rare combination.
Rees is no academic grandee. He is a Wiltshire journalist with soil under his nails and history under his boots, yet his connection to Stonehenge reaches beyond the notebook and the press pass. Covering the upheavals around the Hippy Convoy in the 1980s, which gathered each summer solstice for an anarchic free festival, he found himself reporting from a moment when the site was formally closed, surrounded by barbed wire and police, and stripped of its usual tourist choreography. Stonehenge had become a flashpoint in a wider struggle over access, ritual, and authority. Countercultural gatherings were recast by the Thatcher state as part of an “enemy within”, a category that also encompassed trade unionists and other forms of dissent deemed disruptive or illigitimate to the prevailing order.
Dropped into the middle of this political and cultural reformation, Stonehenge — long at the centre of Britain’s national story — became a charged symbol: a prehistoric monument enlisted into a modern contest over who could gather, who could belong, and who could claim the past. Between confrontations outside the cordons, Rees queued for pasties at the old visitor centre. Even as he recorded the clashes, his eye drifted to the jackdaws wheeling over the trilithons — like ink-stained memories dropped into a turning sky — as though his attention were already circling a different story.
In the years that followed he returned not as tourist but witness: standing at the trench edge as cremated remains were lifted from the Aubrey Holes, and later helping to break the “King of Stonehenge” Bush Barrow story in the national press — work that contributed to securing its gold artefacts for permanent display at the Wiltshire Museum, kept in their native landscape rather than spirited away to a metropolitan vault. He has read deeply, spoken with excavators and geologists, and, above all, remained alert to the lived landscape — Salisbury Plain as a world of water, chalk, burial, and devotion, not an abstract diagram destined for a database, but an occupied, lived, and tactile terrain.
The book is shaped like the monument itself: concentric. It begins with the lie of the land — hills, rivers, ridgeways, and the oft-overlooked Mesolithic spring at nearby Blick Mead — before spiralling inward through dynasties of DNA, strontium-traced teeth, phases of construction, and the symbolic worlds they sustained. Rees keeps his narrative taut and humane. His eye falls not only on the great stones but on the people: the Winterbourne Chieftain who walked between Wales and Wessex; the Mesolithic families at Blick Mead scattering flints the colour of rosewater; the Bush Barrow warrior buried with gold and geometry. These are not dusty artefacts but individuals with routes, diets, injuries, and lives once fully inhabited.
Three Paths to the Centre
At its heart, the book advances three arguments bold enough to provoke, yet laid out with measured restraint. All turn on elements of Stonehenge that resist easy explanation, none more so than the enigmatic Bluestones.
Quarried in the Preseli hills of west Wales and hauled more than two hundred kilometres to Salisbury Plain, the Bluestones form Stonehenge’s earliest monumental core. Smaller than the later sarsens but older, geologically diverse, and acoustically distinctive, they have long been understood as carrying meanings beyond mere structure — their very presence demanding an explanation equal to the effort of their long distance transport.
1) The Bluestones came by sea
The first argument explains how the Bluestones were moved the 200 miles to Stonehenge. Rees rejects the familiar image of an overland slog hauling them from the craggy hills of Preseli to the grasslands of Salisbury Plain, and instead renders vivid and feasible a long-conjectured, if unfashionable, maritime route. With the guidance of a master navigator of the Bristol Channel, he outlines a tidally assisted sea passage: from Preseli to Milford Haven, around the Welsh coast and into the Bristol Channel, then up the Avon before a final haul across to Stonehenge. It is an elegant logistical solution, grounded in modern knowledge of tidal navigation. Here, Rees is persuasive. The argument restores agency and seafaring competence to Neolithic communities — capacities that archaeology has too often been slow to acknowledge.
If the journey of the Bluestones has long been accepted, what remains contested is why these particular stones mattered at all. Academic orthodoxy is largely comfortable with the Preseli–Stonehenge connection; it grows more hesitant when questions of meaning arise. Rees presses precisely at this point, insisting that choice implies intention.
One such intention may lie in sonority. Drawing on the Royal College of Art’s Stone Age Eyes and Ears project, he foregrounds the Bluestones’ acoustic and optical properties. These are stones that ring when struck; stones that, when freshly quarried or polished, flash with star-like mica under shifting light. In Rees’s telling, their power was not abstract or symbolic but physical and immediate: a matter of sound, sheen, and sensation. This is not mysticism, but sensory engagement — qualities any ancient builder would have noticed, and any attentive observer, then or now, could experience directly.
2) Gold artefacts as instruments of geometry
Rees’s second major contribution centres on a small group of extraordinary artefacts found in and around Stonehenge. Three pieces of worked gold point the way to the heart of his argument about the intellectual sophistication of its builders: the Bush Barrow Lozenge, its close kin the Clandon Lozenge, and the Upton Lovell Button. Rees urges us to see these objects not as mere adornments laid upon the honoured dead, but as instruments of thought — precise, portable expressions of geometry and proportion, wrought in gold.
These small wonders from the Wessex barrows have long been admired, turned reverently beneath museum glass, yet rarely asked to speak.
With the help of two young mathematicians, Ivy and Eugene Jiang, Rees looks again. Their careful re-examination identifies pattern where others had seen only decoration. Ratios recur; angles repeat. The Upton Lovell Button’s thirty-six radiating elements, they suggest, may reflect an early sensitivity to circular division — a hint, rather than a proof, of an ordered mathematical imagination at work.
To imagine such knowledge in Bronze Age Wessex is to trespass across familiar timelines. Standard histories of mathematics place the formal development of circular geometry among Sumerian scribes working within a sexagesimal system, later elaborated in Persia and refined in the Mediterranean world by Greek astronomers such as Hipparchus in the second century BC. Yet here, in a chalk-soft land far from those canonical centres, lie objects whose geometry appears deliberate and carefully worked — as if some thread of mathematical understanding had travelled far along ancient sea-roads, or else arisen independently beneath a different sky.
This will be seen by some as a controversial claim — and Rees treats it with care. He is explicit when he moves from evidence to interpretation. He calls upon sibling artefacts such as the Nebra Sky Disc — its astronomical gaze hammered from Cornish goldfields — as part of a wider constellation of signs pointing toward shared ways of seeing and measuring the world. He does not shout conspiracy; he simply asks why these objects are so mathematically exact if not to measure, encode, or remember.
Some may remain unconvinced, but the argument retains its force. At the very least, Rees restores these pieces to dignity as instruments rather than baubles. The Bronze Age world begins to look less mute, less naïve — more like a place where minds, hands, and heavens were delicately aligned; where gold was not ornament, but a way of thinking in metal.
3) Europe as a knowledge-web — with Sumer at one end
Rees is careful: he does not claim a Sumerian colony on the Avon. Rather, he suggests that ideas — particularly mathematical and astronomical — may have travelled westward along trade routes far earlier than standard chronologies tend to allow. In a world that moved amber, jet, gold, and stone across astonishing distances, why should ideas such as geometry be an exception?
Here, the book steps onto sensitive academic ground, where “diffusion” across distances remains an uneasy term. Yet Rees gives the reader the courtesy of transparency: where evidence is firm, he sets it out; where interpretation begins, he marks the transition. He builds his case plainly and then invites judgement.
One may quibble with the phrase “quantum culture,” but the underlying point holds. The Neolithic and Early Bronze Age worlds were not intellectually provincial. They were connected. They exchanged ideas — if not through writing, then through symbol, craft, and stone.
A Critique, such as it is
Inevitably, some will argue that Rees grants speculation too warm a welcome. But the opposite danger — burying the past beneath ever-thickening layers of data and denying interpretation the space to breathe — is just as real. A prevailing, and at times fashionable, post-modern academic caution, particularly around the idea of “grand narratives,” has tended to fracture prehistory into provincial snapshots; Rees argues that the mosaic only resolves when its tiles are read together.
His strength lies in his refusal to apologise for joining evidence with interpretation. Data alone is never enough; it must be thought with, felt through. Those intent on policing the boundary between fact and theory may tut — yet they will also notice that his notes are in order, and that he draws carefully on DNA, isotopes, and lidar.
If anything, the most speculative chapter — linking Wessex geometry to Sumerian astronomy — might have benefited from a fuller acknowledgement of dissent. Yet even here, Rees does not claim consensus. He lays out the clues and follows them, openly, to their conclusion.
Such attempts deserve room. Dogma is not the sole property of religion; it can take root in the academy too, where unfamiliar syntheses are sometimes dismissed not through refutation but through procedural caution and systemic pressures towards intellectual boundary-policing. Rees resists that reflex. He neither demands assent nor shelters behind provocation, but insists on the right to think across evidence rather than remain confined within it. The book is stronger for that intellectual independence.
Stonehenge Deciphered: Putting Flesh Back on the Bones
One of the great strengths of Stonehenge Deciphered is how alive it feels. Rees writes against a desiccated style that too often reduces the prehistoric world to footnotes and typologies. His journalistic instinct looks first for people — the hands, the hunger, the journeys — concealed within the fractured traces brought to light by spade, trowel, and science.
The emotional pulse of the book lies in these human sketches, and it is here that Rees’s integration of Blick Mead becomes structurally important. Rather than treating the Mesolithic spring as a picturesque prelude, he places it alongside the Mesolithic posthole structures discovered beneath the former Stonehenge car park as evidence that this particular place — not merely the wider Plain — was already marked, returned to, and structured by human activity from the early Mesolithic, beginning around 8000 BC, thousands of years before the first ditch was dug and the first stones were raised. Blick Mead, with its perennial warm spring and distinctive pink-stained flints, anchors Stonehenge in deep time, showing continuity of attention rather than sudden inspiration.
Under Rees’s telling, Blick Mead becomes more than a Mesolithic site; it becomes an encounter with strangeness and familiarity intertwined — people gathering where water never froze, aurochs moving like ghosts at dawn, memory accumulating in a landscape already inscribed by posts, paths, and repeated acts. Stonehenge emerges not as an isolated marvel imposed on an empty plain, but as the monumental intensification of a place long known and long held.
That sense of continuity carries forward into the later figures who populate the book. The Winterbourne Chieftain, stepping back and forth between Preseli and Wessex, becomes a living thread binding two landscapes already linked by movement and familiarity. The Bush Barrow warrior, under Rees’s eye, is no longer a museum label but a person buried with gold, geometry, and intention. These figures — glimpsed, pieced together, imagined with care — deepen the story rather than interrupt it, granting Stonehenge back its breath by rooting it in lived lives rather than abstract phases.
Rees writes cleanly, with a reporter’s ear for the telling anecdote and a poet’s respect for image. He never lapses into sentimentality. A quiet wryness runs beneath the prose, an acknowledgement that prehistory is at once immense and intimate: majestic in its alignments, yet grounded in the ordinary rhythms of work, weather, memory, and devotion.
A Verdict
Stonehenge Deciphered is the best kind of popular archaeology: bold yet conscientious, open-minded yet grounded. It will irritate those who believe the past should remain fenced within the tight typologies of academia, but delight readers willing to grant our ancestors the full measure of their intelligence and curiosity.
Rees reminds us that archaeology is not merely a forensic science; it is a human one. Stones do not speak, yet they can be read — and reading them requires both evidence and imagination. To insist on data without interpretation is like keeping a lyre perfectly tuned, yet forever silent. Rees, to his credit, allows it to sound — a quiet music threaded with memory, measure, and craft.
Whether or not one agrees with his grander connections — the golden protractors, the Sumerian horizon — readers shaped by more cautious traditions in British archaeology, from Atkinson through Ruggles to Parker Pearson, will still find the arguments clearly made and worth serious consideration. Even sceptics will concede that Rees achieves something rare: he makes Stonehenge feel new again.
Further Reading / Availability
Stonehenge Deciphered is available now. Those interested in following Rees’s arguments in full can purchase the book via Amazon UK:
Full Interview with Alun Rees to follow.
