WHAT DOES STONEHENGE HAVE TO DO WITH DIVING? The 4000-year-old tourist and druid attraction stands in the middle of Wiltshire, miles from the sea, so has evidence been unearthed of some form of Stone Age scuba?
Until this summer, the connection would have been hard to make. Then, on 18 June, the Millennium Stone was lost beneath the waves in the entrance to Dale Roads and Milford Haven.
Some of the oldest stones in Stonehenge are the blue stones. Not the big ones with the slabs balanced on top of them, but smaller stones that make up the inner ring and are also dotted about elsewhere. Geologists have established that the blue stones could have come only from Pembrokeshire - about 240 miles away.
The most widely supported theory is that most of the journey would have been made by river and sea, with sledges and rollers used for the overland parts.
The Millennium Stone Project was set up to recreate aspects of this journey, moving a 4 tonne block of blue stone from the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire to Stonehenge using the sort of techniques available to neolithic man.

drag and row
The journey began in April. With a target date of arrival at Stonehenge of the autumn equinox in September, and modern safety considerations, some compromises were needed. Basically teams of volunteers would work in relay to drag and row the stone along its route.
The waterborne part of the journey was by curach, basic wood-and-skin boats that are the oldest form of Welsh boat we still know how to make, though no one knows if a raft of curachs was used to move the original blue stones. The Millennium Stone was slung by webbing straps below cross beams rafting together two curachs.
After rowing down the Cleddau estuary and past Milford Haven to Dale, the teams set out towards the open sea and Tenby, but poor weather forced a return to harbour and another night in Dale.
As the raft approached the Angle north cardinal buoy, the crew noticed that the stone was missing. The straps had chafed and worn as the sling swayed in the heavy seas. A small marker buoy had been attached to it, but unfortunately it was attached no longer.
Over the years there have been several reports of blue stones being seen by divers on the bottom of Milford Haven and the surrounding coastline, but nothing had ever been proved. Now the Millennium Stone had sunk to join them.

jackstay search
This is where divers come into the story. Enter Pembrokeshire Dive Charters' owner Steve Lewis. The next weekend, six days after the stone sank, he had a charter from the Diving Club (Reading). Its idea was to make six-diver swimline searches to the north and south of the reported position of the stone.
The planned search would cross a shipping channel, but the harbourmaster agreed to close the harbour for the duration of the search - quite an event for ports as busy as Milford Haven and Pembroke Dock.
With good visibility and 18m-deep water, a fair area was covered, but no sign of the stone was found - though the divers did find some traces of wreckage that could be worth following up later.
With the day's charter over, Steve Lewis got together with two other local divers from Heads of the Valleys BSAC to conduct a jackstay search (between fixed datum lines on the seabed) about the reported position that evening. Nothing.
Back at Dale on Sunday evening, three more divers from West Wales Divers were recruited to help, and charts and tides pondered over.
This time a new 350m coil of rope was used to mark back along the course of the curachs, based on the old adage "look as far as you think it could be and then look as far again". The plan was to conduct a much longer swimline search following the line marked by the rope.
The divers were well along the line when Steve and his dive buddy Alan Oakley eventually located the stone 300m from the starting position.
No, it wasn't a fix. Steve let the other divers choose the side of the line they wanted to search and took the remaining side for himself.

on location
The next morning I met Steve on the pontoon at Dale. We were supposed to dive some sites for Diver Wreck Tour. "I've found the blue stone," he said. "Do you want to get some pictures of it?"
The tides were favourable and our plans modified to make a short dive on the stone.
Later Steve called the BBC producer covering the story and mentioned the pictures. He asked if I could take some video of it, and I replied: "No, but I know a man who can". A friend was in the area diving with Bristol University and had his video camera with him. So on Wednesday morning Steve set out with Rob Gibbs as the cameraman and me as the director and star!
Arriving on site brought disappointment - the buoy had gone. A simple video trip now turned into a search to relocate the stone. Steve had differential GPS numbers for the buoy he had placed, but these were taken from the end of 50m of rope in 18m of water.

scene of surprise
Knowing the nature of the seabed and with a shot on the GPS numbers, he suggested searching an arc from 50m to the south-east of the buoy and swinging round with the current to the south-west. With a relatively flat seabed, the idea was that we would swim the outside of the arc and our search line would snag on the stone.
Rob and I descended the shot and reeled out 50m of line to the south-east. Within minutes the radius of our search had shortened to the point that I knew we had caught something. We had - an old anchor.
I freed the line and we continued. Soon the line caught again and we followed it in to the stone. We had planned to record a scene of surprise and jubilation on finding the stone and we didn't have to fake it. I smiled and Rob got it all on tape.
It turned out that the buoy line had been torn just a few metres up from the stone by something jerking on it. It must have been something big jerking pretty hard to tear a line like that.
Steve suspected a trawler entering the harbour at night with little regard for the marked channel. My favourite candidate was one of the ferries which habitually cut the corner of the shipping lane coming into the harbour, something the supertanker Sea Empress had tried and failed to do successfully a couple of years before. Either way, I hope it bent a shaft.

floating crane
Next day, it was time to lift the stone. We didn't bother about Stone Age techniques. A Royal Maritime Auxiliary Service floating crane and a team of divers from Pembroke Dock was recruited to help out.
From the RMAS's diving support boat, divers on surface supply equipment attached straps and a lifting cable to the stone. The RMAS supplied underwater video to the BBC and I took stills of them all in action.
Everyone had to be out of the water before the RMAS floating crane could approach close enough to lift the stone.
The RIB I was in manoeuvred among boats full of journalists, cameramen and other photographers to get a good view, though we needn't have worried because, like all good film events, there were several re-takes as the crane dunked the stone in and out of the water.
In the middle of all this a ferry entered the harbour, cutting the corner of the shipping channel and passing just a couple of hundred metres south of the boats.

call a geologist
The day ended with the blue stone deposited on the beach close to the low-water mark, ready to be strapped below the curachs again to resume its journey to Wiltshire. It's still there.
Further attempts to move the reluctant megalith failed, blamed on bad weather. The Millennium Stone project was postponed until summer 2001, with critics arguing that £100,000 of Lottery funding had been squandered.
That apart, with many miles of rowing along the South Wales coastline and up the River Avon, there is a chance that stones from the original Stonehenge construction could have been lost at sea.
So if you find a roughly rectangular block of stone about 3m long and looking a bit out of place off the South Wales coast, mark its position and call a geologist. You might have made the critical find that proves the theory of how the blue stones got to Stonehenge.

For more information on the Millennium Stone, visit www.bluestone.org.uk

Waiting for the boat at Dale

Navy divers use hardhats and surface supply to attach lifting straps

raising the stone

Safely on board

The troublesome bluestone is secured using modern techniques - but where is it destined to end up?

TV and press were quick to cover the story