The bluestones at Stonehenge's centre travelled roughly 200 kilometres from Wales, and a 2021 excavation may have found where they stood first.
Tracing the quarries
Geological matching has pinned specific bluestones to outcrops in the Preseli Hills of west Wales, including Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, where a team led by Mike Parker Pearson identified quarrying traces consistent with Neolithic extraction. How the stones, each weighing several tonnes, moved from Wales to Salisbury Plain is unresolved; sledges and log rollers over land, rafts along rivers and coastline, or some combination have all been argued, and no route has been confirmed by finds along the way.
A circle that may have moved twice
In 2021 Parker Pearson's team reported excavations at Waun Mawn, a partly dismantled stone circle in Preseli whose surviving socket holes match the diameter of Stonehenge's earliest earthwork and include one socket shaped to fit a bluestone later identified at Stonehenge itself. Their hypothesis is that a circle first stood in Wales and was later dismantled and re-erected on Salisbury Plain, an idea published in Antiquity that has not yet displaced simpler transport-only explanations.
Why anyone bothered
Whatever the route, moving stones this size this far was a deliberate, costly choice, which is itself evidence for how much the specific source mattered to the builders.