A university professor who trekked 222 miles through the Welsh and English countryside completed his mission of reaching Stonehenge on schedule, tracing one of the possible routes that Neolithic peoples may have used to transport the megaliths from the Preseli Hills to the Salisbury Plains.

Professor Keith Ray, who reached the stones on the afternoon of Sunday, April 21, was joined along different sections of his walk by numerous academics, archaeologists and other experts to learn the terrain by walking.

The end of the journey comes less than one month after Dr Brian John, a former geography lecturer at Durham University, released a research paper contending that the bluestone monoliths were not transported from Wales by neolithic humans.

Win Scutt, senior properties curator (west) for English Heritage, who labelled Keith’s trip an “absolutely astonishing, heroic achievement”, said it was insulting, in light of all the evidence, for academics to still doubt the stones’ overland transportation.

Win said: “I’m really angry that they continue to do this. It implies that our neolithic ancestors were less capable.

“I think we need to applaud and appreciate these people.”

An interesting discovery Keith found with his low-tech method of research was a route through the hills and mountains between Wales and England which never required more than a 20-degree climb.

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Along the walk, Keith was joined by more than 20 other academics.

He said: “I can remember bits of the landscape by remembering who was walking with me that day.”

He added that while walking across the English countryside that would have been crossed, much of which is still sparsely populated today, he noticed the lines of travel often still follow where the ancients would have walked, by going with the land and following the path of least resistance.

Keith said: “We were impressed on the walk there were roads that followed an ancient path in their route.”

One of those who walked part of the way with Keith was Kate Churchill, an archaeologist at Churchill Archaeology in Monmouthshire, who walked with Keith in the part of his itinerary that brought him through Mordiford and Paget’s Wood in Herefordshire.

Kate remarked how walking today can be very comparable to walking the area during the neolithic times. Unlike routine field work on development sites, she said there were multiple chances to “stop and look at the landscape and be inspired”.