Ice-flow modelling stops the Stonehenge Altar Stone's glacier ride at Dogger Bank

An ice sheet reconstruction is better at ruling a route out than at putting one particular rock in one particular place. The Sheffield Hallam and Curtin team paired mineral grain dating with computer models of ice movement during Britain's last ice age ^[3]. The firmer half of the result, in the release dated 23 September 2026, is the negative one: the modelling indicates no viable glacial pathway linking the source region directly to Stonehenge ^[5][13].

The Dogger Bank half is weaker in kind, because the modelling shows only where ice could have carried rock. "Our modeling shows glaciers may have transported rocks part of the way during the last Ice Age -- potentially as far as Dogger Bank in the North Sea -- but not into southern England, meaning the stone would still have needed to be moved hundreds of kilometers by people," said Anthony Clarke of Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences ^[7][16]. The release does not report a megalith recovered from the Dogger Bank seabed ^[14].

The argument for any large stone sitting in Doggerland is geological absence. The landscape, off the east coast of England and now beneath the North Sea, had no rock outcrops of its own, so anything sizeable found there arrived from somewhere else, potentially carried by glaciers ^[11]. The Altar Stone is a six-tonne sandstone whose source was recently traced to northeast Scotland, roughly 700 km from the monument ^[1][2].

Remy Veness, co-lead author at Sheffield Hallam, said: "We recently discovered that the origin of the Altar Stone is northeast Scotland, but how it traveled 700 km to Salisbury Plain is widely debated" ^[9][16]. The proposed route needs people twice. "Hypothetically, the Altar Stone could have been significant enough to be willing to move the stone at least twice; First to potentially save it from being submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age and then again to its final resting place on Salisbury Plains," Veness said ^[10]. One glacial leg plus those two human moves gives at least three stages ^[15], the last of them running toward the Berkshire Ridgeway, which the release calls the oldest road in Europe and dates to around the time Stonehenge was built ^[12].

Motive is outside what the modelling can test. Clarke said it was likely moved in stages, potentially combining overland hauling with river or coastal transport where possible ^[8]. Veness flagged the cultural-significance part as hypothetical ^[10]. I would take the exclusion as the durable finding and the Dogger Bank waypoint as a proposal that needs a stone on the seabed to become more. If the route is correct, the release says, the move would have demanded significant cooperation among Neolithic communities ^[18].