Developed and populated around 2600 BCE, Avebury is the site of a stunning concentration of Neolithic and Bronze Age remnants including West Kennet long barrow, Silbury Hill, ditches, avenues and the enigmatic circles within circles of standing stones. I went a couple of years ago on a King Arthur road trip with Emily and this time we returned with Sally.
The astonishing feature of Avebury is that you can get super-close to the stones and walk along and amongst their grandeur. They are a perfect way, if you visit the Alexander Keiller museum on site, to introduce you to the weird landscapes in this part of the country before going on to the monumental “other” part of the World Heritage Site, site of many a battle between environmentalists, pagan worshippers and English Heritage…. Stonehenge.
Stonehenge’s axis runs north-east to south-west and at midsummer the sun rises in the north-east and at midwinter the sun sets in the south-west. Even on a May evening (when we were there) on a clear night the sun setting is a powerful event. It’s easy to be awestruck about how the original builders and engineers could align both solstices, six months and 180 degrees apart.
Avebury’s stones were lifted into their positions at a similar time that the Egyptians were raising up the Great Pyramid at Giza. Given the other Great Wonders of the Ancient World, I have to conclude that just because we have no written records, it does not mean our ancestors were incapable of scientifically elaborate achievements. What would we now know about the past if the Librar(ies) at Alexandria had not burned down several times – nor indeed if other libraries throughout the world had been better preserved?
Long barrows in the Stonehenge landscape appeared as early 3500 BCE and by 500 years later the first wide circle (with smaller stones) had been constructed. Avebury (and the Great Pyramid at Giza) came about 500 years after that. We can place the erection of the larger stone circle with its uprights and lintels to about 2500 BCE, two generations after Avebury.
A nearby settlement either housed the builders or thrived on the trade generated by the presence of Stonehenge and a group of huts have been recreated next to the Visitor Centre.
Over the years Stonehenge has been proclaimed a celestial clock, a temple, a place of sacrifice, an art installation, an impressive site for civic ceremonies – the current view is that we simply do not know how it was used in its heyday. We’re not even sure it was ever completed.
One certainty is that it could never have originally been a Druids’ Temple, as Druid practices began in the Iron Age, long after Stonehenge had appeared. Druids may have appropriated the stones in later years, but so have poets, novelists, songwriters, artists and plain old romantics….
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