Having waited patiently for the much hailed BBC Timewatch documentary to reveal the evidence that Stonehenge was built as a centre of healing, I can only express my deep disappoinment at their outlandish and wholly unfounded conclusions.

Don’t get me wrong, I am happier than the average man to believe that Bluestone has special properties. I have long had connections with people who believe that the stone can be used for healing and spiritual communication purposes, but aren’t archaeologists supposed to be scientists?

To claim that the bones of the famous Amesbury Archer provide evidence for their hypothesis is like saying that someone buried in Bolton must have been on his way to Blackburn Rovers Stadium to seek a cure, because he happened to have died of multiple ailments around the time that the stadium was built.

As for the explanation regarding the preponderance of Bluestone chippings found in the dig, drawing the conclusion that these stones were chipped away by the sick and maimed (and then abandoned) is quite nonsensical. Without doubt, Stonehenge was an important centre with at least one very important purpose, and visitors may well have succumbed to the urge to take a souvenir, but speculation is one thing and proof is another.

One much more logical explanation would be that the Bluestones were dressed on-site while the much larger sarcen stones were largely pre-worked before moving them, which would have made transportation much easier.

Onward now to the equally unsupported claim that Stonehenge was started 2,300 years BC, and not 2,600 BC, as was previously thought. The evidence put forward for this startling claim is that several pieces of organic material found beneath the Bluestone that was excavated all dated to that period. Remarkably, in the same documentary they inform us that the Bluestones have been erected on the site several times (something that we already knew), having been removed from the site altogether during one phase of redesign. I would not dispute that organic material entering the hole at the time of digging could be used for dating purposes, but surely all they have managed to do is date the last time that the stone was erected, not the time of the arrival of the Bluestones at the Wiltshire Downs!

Frankly I find all the so-called revelations surprising, particularly as the idea that the Bluestones have healing powers did not germinate in ‘archaeological circles’ in the first place. Perhaps the experts should be quietly reminded, it was only a matter of a few years ago that the archaeological community stood shoulder to shoulder behind the now discredited theory that the Bluestones were brought to Wiltshire by glacial activity.

BBC Stonehenge Documentraty II