Avebury Totally Explained

Everything about Avebury totally explained

Avebury is the site of a large henge and several stone circles in the English county of Wiltshire surrounding the village of Avebury. It is one of the finest and largest Neolithic monuments in Europe dating to around 5,000 years ago. It is older than the megalithic stages of Stonehenge, which is located about to the south, although the two monuments are broadly contemporary overall. It lies approximately midway between the towns of Marlborough and Calne, just off the main A4 road on the northbound A4361 towards Wroughton. The henge is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and a World Heritage Site.
Avebury is a National Trust property.

The monument

Most of the surviving structure consists of earthworks known as the dykes, consisting of a massive ditch and external bank henge in diameter and in circumference. The only known comparable sites of similar date (Stonehenge and Flagstones in Dorset) are only a quarter of the size of Avebury. The ditch alone was wide and deep, with its primary fill carbon dated to between 3400 and 2625 BC. A later date in this period is more likely although excavation of the bank has demonstrated that it has been enlarged, presumably using material excavated from the ditch. The fill at the bottom of the final ditch would therefore post-date any in an earlier, shallower ditch that no longer exists.
   Within the henge is a great Outer Circle constituting prehistory's largest stone circle with a diameter of . It was contemporary with or built around four or five centuries after the earthworks. There were originally 98 sarsen standing stones some weighing in excess of 40 tons. They varied in height from 3.6 to 4.2 m as exemplified at the north and south entrances. Carbon dates from the fills of the stoneholes date between 2800 and 2400 BC.
   Nearer the middle of the monument are two other, separate stone circles. The Northern inner ring measures in diameter, although only two of its standing stones remain with two further, fallen ones. A cove of three stones stood in the middle, its entrance pointing northeast. The Southern inner ring was in diameter before its destruction. The remaining sections of its arc now lie beneath the village buildings. A single large monolith, high, stood in the centre along with an alignment of smaller stones until their destruction in the eighteenth century. There is an avenue of paired stones, the West Kennet Avenue, leading from the south eastern entrance of the henge and traces of a second, the Beckhampton Avenue lead out from the western one. Aubrey Burl conjectures a sequence of construction beginning with the North and South Circles erected around 2800 BC, followed by the Outer Circle and henge around two hundred years later and the two avenues added around 2400 BC.
   A timber circle of two concentric rings, identified through archaeological geophysics possibly stood in the northeast sector of the outer circle, although this awaits testing by excavation. A ploughed barrow is also visible from the air in the northwestern quadrant.
   The henge had four entrances, two opposing ones on a north by northwest and south by southeast line, and two on an east by northeast and west by southwest line.
   Despite being a man-made structure, it was featured on the 2005 TV programme Seven Natural Wonders as one of the wonders of the West Country because it consists of natural components.

Destruction of the stones

Many of the original stones were destroyed from the early 14th century onwards to provide local building materials and to make room for agriculture. The stones were also destroyed due to a fear of the pagan rituals that were associated with the site. Both John Aubrey and later, William Stukeley visited the site and described the destruction. Stukeley spent much of the 1720s recording what remained of Avebury and the surrounding monuments.
Only 27 stones of the Outer Circle survive and many of these are examples re-erected by Alexander Keiller in the 1930s. Concrete pylons now mark the former locations of the missing stones and it's likely that more stones are buried on the site. English Heritage is currently considering whether to dig up and re-erect these stones.

Excavations

Excavation at Avebury itself has been limited. Sir Henry Meux put a trench through the bank in 1894, which gave the first indication that the earthwork was built in two phases.
   The site was surveyed and excavated intermittently between 1908 and 1922 by a team of workmen under Harold St George Gray. He was able to demonstrate that the Avebury builders had dug down into the natural chalk in excavating the henge ditch, producing an outer bank high around the whole perimeter of the henge and using red deer antler as their primary digging tool. Gray recorded the base of the ditch as being flat and wide although some later archaeologists have questioned his use of untrained labour to excavate the ditch and suggested that its form may have been different. Gray found few artefacts in the ditch fill but did recover scattered human bones, jawbones being particularly well represented. At a depth of about, Gray encountered a complete skeleton of a woman only tall who had been buried there.
   Archaeologist Alexander Keiller re-erected many of the stones during the 1930s. Under one, now known as the Barber Stone, the skeleton of a man was discovered. Coins found with him dated from the 1320s, and the evidence suggests that he was fatally injured while digging the burial pit for the stone when it fell on top of him. As well as the coins, he was found with a pair of scissors and a lancet, the tools of a barber-surgeon at that time, hence the name given to the stone. When a new village school was built in 1969 there was also limited further opportunity to examine the site and an excavation to produce carbon dating material and environmental data was undertaken in 1982.
   The sequence of excavations has been examined by Dr Joshua Pollard in a series of volumes about Avebury.

Theories about Avebury

A great deal of interest surrounds the stones at the monument which people describe often as being in one of two categories; tall and slender, or short and squat. This leads to numerous theories relating to the importance of gender in Neolithic Britain with the taller stones considered 'male' and the shorter ones 'female'. The stones were not dressed in any way and may have been chosen for their pleasing natural forms. Numerous people have identified what they claim are carvings on the stones' surfaces, some carvings being more persuasive than others.
   The human bones found by Gray point to some form of funerary purpose and have parallels in the disarticulated human bone often found at earlier causewayed enclosure sites. Ancestor worship, although on a huge scale, could have been one of the purposes of the monument and wouldn't be mutually exclusive with any male/female ritual role.
   The henge, although clearly forming an imposing boundary to the circle, has no defensive purpose as the ditch is on the inside. Being a henge and stone circle site, astronomical alignments are a common theory to explain the positioning of the stones at Avebury.
   The relationships between the causewayed enclosure, Avebury stone circles and, further south, West Kennet long barrow has caused some people to term this area a ritual complex - that is, a site with many monuments of interlocking religious function.

The Avebury triangle

A large part of the small village of Avebury, complete with public house, is enclosed within the monument. Two local roads intersect within the monument, and visitors can walk on the earthworks.
The two stone avenues (Kennet Avenue and Beckhampton Avenue) that meet at Avebury define two sides of triangle that's designated a World Heritage site and which includes The Sanctuary, Windmill Hill, Silbury Hill and the West Kennet Long Barrow.

Alternative Avebury

Avebury is seen as a spiritual centre by many who profess beliefs such as Paganism, Wicca, Druidry and Heathenry, and indeed for some it's regarded more highly than Stonehenge. The pagan festivals all attract visitors, and the summer solstice especially draws increasingly large crowds from the religious to the idly curious. Avebury is said to stand on the St Michael ley line, an alignment that goes across England from Cornwall to East Anglia.
As with Stonehenge, though, access regarding both interpretation and physical presence is contested. While Avebury henge and circles are 'open' to all, access has been controlled through closure of the car park. Pressure of numbers on this circle is an issue begging resolution, and various attempts at negotiation are underway. Avebury is increasingly important for tourism today, and how visitors relate to Avebury is part of the study of the Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights project (http://www.sacredsites.org.uk).
The National Trust, who steward and protect the site (owned by English Heritage) are also actively in dialogue with the Pagan community, who use the site as a religious temple or place of worship. This dialogue takes place through the National Trust's Avebury Sacred Sites Forum

. The project has a charter and guidelines for visitors, which helps to foster understanding between the Pagan community and the general public visiting the site.

Avebury in the media

The area was used in Children of the Stones (1976), a British television drama produced for children. Derek Jarman's silent, 10-minute short film A Journey to Avebury (1971) is set amongst the stones.
   The stones were seen in a key moment in the 1998 comedy Still Crazy, starring Billy Connolly, Stephen Rea, Jimmy Nail, Timothy Spall and Bill Nighy. The film also features a scene inside the Red Lion at Avebury.
   It was featured on the 2005 TV programme Seven Natural Wonders as one of the wonders of the West Country.
   Avebury is one of the "uncommonly British days out" featured in the 2005 book Bollocks to Alton Towers, the authors recommending it as the antithesis of the packaged and restricted tourist experience to be found at the nearby and more famous Stonehenge. Catherine Fisher's 2005 novel Darkhenge is set in and around Avebury.

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