Avebury and West Kennet Avenue

It is still Sunday 26 May 1998, though by now it is working it's way towards the end of the day and the sun has finally come out! So it's back to my favourite place, Avebury.

Driving through the village, I stop the car alongside two parallel rows of standing stones, the Avenue that stretched towards Stonehenge. Unfortunately the sun was on the wrong side for me to photograph the car next to the Avenue, which I would have liked to have done as I have a photo of a previous car parked in that same spot.

We drove back towards Avebury in a reflective mood and parked in the public car park. With some effort we ignored the ice cream van that we had already visited that morning and walked into the village passing the playing fields to our right.

We saw that most English of scenes - the village cricket match, the sound of the leather-coated ball upon the willow of the bat. The old joke goes: "I miss the sound of leather upon willow... but Willow has promised to write..." A smattering of applause as someone is bowled out and the gentle, almost lazy voices of cricketers and spectators enjoying themselves; "Well done, Brian, well done..."

The village itself tends to be overshadowed in the minds of visitors by the ancient monument. It's a shame, because the village is extremely pretty with thatched cottages and plenty to see. Avebury church stands, as do many of England's old churches, directly on a ley line that runs through the village.

The church lychgate.

The Henge Shop is a focal point for souvenir hunters and sells a large range of books about Wiltshire monumental sites, the prehistory of the area, and such topics as crop circle and other phenomena. You can hear many languages being spoken as you pass through the shop! Despite the late hour (and the pub being so full there was no chance of getting a meal) we decided to walk a circuit of the embankment outside the huge ditch.

So here are the spectacular photos from the day... With the sun low in the sky, the earthworks show their contours and their vast size in this photograph.

The stones are so massive that you wonder, as you do at Stonehenge, how the engineers of 3000 years ago managed to move and set them up to stand so firmly that they would last so long. Such is the atmosphere that even the sheep behind me are forming themselves into rings!

And I'll finish with one of my favourite photographs of all time. If the stones make you wonder how they did it, then look for the figures walking along the top of the embankment and wonder again at the sheer size of the earthworks that make up the henge at Avebury. How many hours would it take to dig that out with an ox's shoulder blade as a spade?

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Cherhill and Avebury

Sunday 26 May 1998. We were heading for Avebury's massive prehistoric earthworks.

The road I chose took us past the white horse at Cherhill. There are several of these horses in the area. They date from prehistory to this century and are "drawn" by scraping the turf from the underlying chalk and repeated weedings known as scourings. In the photo if you follow the horizon above the horse to the right you will see two small bumps. They are the earthworks of an Iron Age hillfort.

Avebury never ceases to fascinate me. I think after Glastonbury it is the most magical place in England. Forget Stonehenge, if it's atmosphere you want then come to Avebury. The huge earthworks and the remains of the stone circle entirely surround the village.

The whole of this is then surrounded with a ditch and outer rampart. And what a ditch! Bear in mind that it will have filled up with a fair bit of dust and debris over the last couple of thousand years...

Inside the immense henge of Avebury are the remains of smaller stone circles. Some of these stones were destroyed a few hundred years ago when the villagers sought to use the stone for building. Large fires were started around stones which were then cooled rapidly by dousing them with water. The expansion due to the heat followed by rapid contraction caused the stones to split apart. Reportedly the practice stopped after a man was blinded by a flying chip of stone causing superstitious minds to race into overdrive! Small concrete obelisks have been set where stones have been destroyed.

Also note how few people walk inside this stone circle and how the ones that do stay close to the perimeter. On our first visit our daughter Gillian who was about 6 at the time, refused point blank to walk inside the circle saying that it "felt funny".

Many ley lines cross here. In the village itself is The Henge Shop selling souvenirs and books about the village and Wiltshire and stone circles in general. A shame about the dull weather. We have a couple more stops during the day and then the sun will come out later so we will return to see Avebury at its most spectacular best.

Return to Wiltshire, Cotswolds and Avon 1998 Index

King Arthur's Round Table

Strange that only a week ago I mentioned King Arthur as yesterday I had an email from Switzerland, where there is to be an exhibition called King Arthur and his Knights from April through to October 2008. The exhibition is to be a joint venture between Schweizerisches Institut für Kinder- und Jugendmedien (the Swiss Institute for Children's and Youth Media) SIKJM and Museum Aargau and will be shown simultaneously in two venues: Castle Lenzburg and Castle Hallwyl in Kanton Argau, Switzerland.

The organisers wrote to me, asking to use the photograph shown here of the henge earthworks known as King Arthur's Round Table at Eamont Bridge near Penrith in Cumbria. It appears on my Stone Circles web page (using web space no longer available). I took the photograph on slide film in 1985 and over the 22 years of its existence I'm afraid it has attracted a great deal of dust and grime. Anyway I cleaned it up as best I could and sent the largest scan I could and for good measure sent some more recent photos taken in better weather which were a bit sharper.

We think of King Arthur and his knights as riding around in medieval armour, because the main stories about him were written (and the majority made up) some 600 or so years after he would have lived and they were a bit - how should I say - modernised by Geoffrey of Monmouth, to extol the virtues of 12th aristocracy. He introduced most of the characters that we associate with Arthur, including Merlin, Uther and Ygerne and even the associations with Tintagel and Avalon. A bit like historians of the future taking the film Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves as the basis for their understanding of 13th Century England...