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But how? Wainwright and Darvill say that while they don't know exactly, the movement of large stones is not that rare in human history. Huge blocks were being shifted and erected by Neolithic people in France at around the same time to build tombs – not to mention the pyramids of Egypt.

"It isn't a problem," says Wainwright. "Societies in the midthird millennium BC were quite capable of moving great quantities of timber and heavy stones across the country for many miles." Most of Stongehenge's bluestones were quarried at a site known as Carn Menyn in Wales.

The most likely route would have required traversing close to 400 km, with the stones floated on rafts, then pulled overland by teams of men and oxen or rolled on logs, along the south coast of Wales, crossing the Avon River near Bristol and then heading southeast to the Salisbury Plain. Alternatively, the stones may have come by boat around Land's End in Cornwall and along the south coast of England before heading upriver and finally overland to Stonehenge.

Whatever the route and method, the immensity of the undertaking, requiring thousands of man-hours and sophisticated logistics, has convinced Darvill and Wainwright that the bluestones must have been considered extraordinary. After all, Stonehenge's sarsens – blocks of hard sandstone used to build the towering trilithons (see photo, p44) – were quarried and collected from the Marlborough Downs a mere 32 km to the north.

The two men have spent the last five years surveying the Preseli Mountains, trying to ascertain why Neolithic people might have believed the stones had mystical properties. Most were quarried at a site known as Carn Menyn, a series of rocky outcrops of white-spotted dolerite. "It's a very special area," says Wainwright, 70, and himself a Welshman. "Approaching Carn Menyn from the south you go up and up, then all of a sudden you see this rampart composed of natural pillars of stone."

Clearly Carn Menyn inspired the ancients. Gors Fawr, a collection of 16 upright bluestones arranged in a circle, sits at the bottom of a Carn Menyn hill. And Bedd Arthur, another nearby bluestone structure, coincides almost precisely with the pattern at Stonehenge. Darvill even suggests that both might have provided inspiration for key components of Stonehenge.

But Darvill and Wainwright say the real turning point came in 2006, when the pair looked beyond Carn Menyn's rock formations and began studying some springs around the base of the crags, many of which had been altered to create 'enhanced springheads' – natural spouts had been dammed up with short walls to create pools where the water emerged from the rock. More important, some of the springheads were adorned with prehistoric art.

"This is very unusual," says Wainwright. "You get springs that have funny things done to them in the Roman and Iron Age periods, but to see it done in the prehistoric period is rare, so we knew we were on to something."

In his history of Britain, the aforementioned Geoffrey of Monmouth noted that the medicinal powers of Stonehenge's stones were stimulated by pouring water over them for the sick to bathe in. Indeed, many of the springs and wells in southwest Wales are still believed to have healing powers and are used in this way by locals. As Wainwright recalls, "The pieces of the puzzle came together when Tim and I looked at each other and said, 'It's got to be about healing'."

Once the archaeologists concluded that the ancients had endowed the Carn Menyn rocks with mystical properties, 'franchising' them to Stonehenge made sense. "Its intrinsic power would seem to be locked into the material from which it was made and, short of visiting Carn Menyn, which might not have been always feasible, the next best step would have been to create a shrine from the powerful substance – the stone from Carn Menyn itself," says Timothy Insoll, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester. He has documented similar behaviour in northern Ghana, where boulders from the Tonna'ab earth shrine – similarly invested with curative properties – have been taken to affiliated shrines at new locations.

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