This Rock Just Rewrote British Prehistory... (and it's not Stonehenge!)

Today is an extremely exciting day in the world of British archaeology, and I'm about to show you something that might just flip my study on its head. These right here are the Devil's Arrows, a row of three very tall stones in the centre of North Yorkshire, Northern England. In fact, they are the second tallest megalithic stones in the British Isles, surpassing even Stonehenge in height. We're not sure when they date to, but probably the Neolithic. For the better part of 500 years, nerds across our drizzly isles have puzzled over these stones, imagining them as an astronomical calendar, a giant signpost, or even as the remains of a massive megalithic circle. But a study was released just last week which may just flip our understanding of these stones on their head. I just showed some footage of me jumping over a little crack in the rocks. Turns out that the drop down there would have easily killed me, and that was extremely stupid to do. You meet me on the eastern edge of the Yorkshire Dales. I'm at the Brimham Rocks basically, or the Brimham Walks as I often call them. Nothing to see yet, but at the top of this hill there's something quite incredible. Only last year did I make a video on these incredible stones where I say this. The Devil's Arrows are not natural boulders. These are thought to be quarried, and they were quarried from a place called Plumpton Rocks, about nine miles to the west. As you will soon learn by watching this video, that is outdated information. And there may be more than a few forgotten arrows hidden around the place. Yeah, exciting. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I often describe the arrows as a lost stonehenge. That's classic YouTube affair, but they do have a lot in common. For instance, these stones are dressed, meaning that they have been shaped all over their surface to make these big, beautiful columns. Stonehenge's sarsens are just like this, and like those sarsens, the Devil's Arrows were seemingly quarried and carried from somewhere else. The type of stone they're made from is not local. Now, you may have heard of one Anthony Clark. Oh, oh you haven't? Well, you should have. Because he is the man who made a name for himself two years ago, when he proved that the Stonehenge Altar Stone originated in the Orcadian Basin of Northern Scotland. A pretty wild study, which has both intrigued and annoyed me since it was published. Clark's work absolutely flipped the study of Stonehenge and British prehistory on its head. But the amount of wild speculation that then followed by many big name archaeologists, was, in my opinion, ridiculous. There's also a little bit of Scotland here at the Brimham Rocks. Tonic wine. They're everywhere, those pesky Scots. It is amazing news then that Mr. Clark contacted me around a month ago to let me know that him, slash Chris Kirkland at Curtin University, Australia, and Jim Leary of the University of York, had been testing the Devil's Arrows. It felt like it was a study made specifically for me. And it may as well have been, because this is fascinating. By gently grabbing some material from the surface of these stones using duct tape, Clark and co were able to compare the type of stone that the Devil's Arrows were carved from against others in the local area. All stones have their own little fingerprint and geologists with amazing new tech are able to basically scan that fingerprint and find out where they came from. Now the Arrows, for almost all of their history, have been believed to originate at the Plumpton Rocks, 10 miles to the west. Stones weighing upwards of 10 tons, being dragged for 12 miles through the Yorkshire landscape. If you know Yorkshire, it's not a flat land. This theory goes all the way back to a man called Thomas Pennant in the 1770s, when the Plumpton Rocks were a bit of a tourist site. These big weird rock formations with an artificial lake in the middle. A really weird and cool site, but today it feels almost abandoned. To the public, the Plumpton Rocks have been largely replaced by the better known, Brimham Rocks, 10 miles to the northwest. It looks like Pride Rock from Lion King, you know. I actually tried to come to the Brimham Rocks years ago and I never actually walked up to the stones. I had so little money at the time that I parked up in the car park, saw the price of parking from the National Trust, and got back in the car and drove home. It's a complete tourist trap if you ask me, and nowhere near as atmospheric as the Plumpton Rocks, but they're effectively the same weird formation just on a hill. I don't have the particular geological know-how of how these things came to be, but to be honest it doesn't matter because when prehistoric people happened upon them, they also didn't know. What would Neolithic man think of this? You know, would they come along here and just assume they're natural like we do today? I mean we kind of take geology for granted nowadays. We know geology, we know what forms things like this, but back then did they know? Did they think this was man-made? Was it made by the gods or the god? Nobody knows. It's a complete mystery why people were interested in things like this, but I tell you what, it is interesting. Now I want you to guess where Clark & Co found the Devil's Arrows to have originated. Drumroll please. Yes, that's right. Brimham. The arrows were dragged 12 miles from here, which many people may scoff at as this is basically the same area as the Plumpton Rocks, but hear me out. How the f*** did Thomas Pennant and whoever he heard that theory from get within 10 miles of guessing the right origin for the Devil's Arrows? It's actually unbelievable. I can only assume that, like the people of the 16th century, the Neolithic people found the Brimham Rocks to be a great local landmark known for its rock. I just walked past a woman over there sat on one of the rocks and I was sort of earwigging a bit and she was talking to, I think, her dad about having recently gotten out of an institute. Mental health, let's just say that, and she was sat there on those rocks talking about how she'd come somewhere that made her feel tranquil. She'd come somewhere peaceful, I think is what she said, and I do find that interesting. You know, what draws us to places like this that makes us feel all right? You know, were those Neolithic people who came back here also, did they find something magical? I don't know. The amount of sort of tall spire-like stones in this landscape, it would make sense that if people venerated this, they'd want to bring it with them, and I'm curious if that's what happened over in Borough Bridge with the Devil's Arrows. Did they simply take these big columns of stone and place them where they wanted them in their own unique human way? But in my opinion, that is the least interesting part of this. For one, there is a stone just south of the Brimham Rocks, long suspected to have been just a cattle rub, which bears a striking resemblance to the Devil's Arrows. It's found deep into private land and there was a bull in the field when I visited it. So here's an image from a user called Postman on the megalithic portal. Let's just quickly say this is a beautiful image. Sole survivor of a vast complex consisting of three stone circles, five stone rows and two chambered cairns. Oh no, not really. I've been pranked, basically. It makes me wonder whether these stones were taken from this general area, south of the Brimham Rocks. Secondly, Antony Clark and co. may have found a fourth arrow. Do you see this? It's what's known as the Battle Cross. It sits just down the hill from the arrows, near the Roman town of Aldeburgh. It dates to the 15th century and commemorates the Battle of Borough Bridge, only a century before Camden first described four Devil's Arrows in the field they currently occupy, one of which was allegedly broken up and not long before made his report. So imagine my surprise when I learned that this cross was a Devil's Arrow. Yeah, when tested this cross is made from the exact same stone dragged 12 miles from the west. It has to have been one of the Devil's Arrows. It's the right height to be one. Anyway, that's a little update on the Devil's Arrows and opportunity for me to prance around some rocks in the rain. I thank you all so much for watching. Please do hit the like button and the subscribe button and the hype button. Do all of those things and I will make sure that I go to the Devil's Arrows and do a blessing for you. All your dreams will come true if you press the like and subscribe button. I promise you. Bye.