Crumpets and Ginger Beer: Day 29: We found our thrill on Silbury Hill (and elsewhere..)

Freshly fed and laundered by 8am this morning, we scuttled off for a big explore of the massive and ancient ceremonial landscape that is Avebury and its environs. The entire region has World Heritage status and is simply fabulous.

First stop was Silbury Hill (about 2kms from Avebury) a man-made, 40-metre-high hill of soil and chalk, built over a long period from about 2,500 BC.  There have been very few archaeological finds that might provide theories as to its purpose. The best guess is that some-one started a pile of dirt, others started adding to it and it went on for centuries.   It's certainly an imposing edifice, perched as it is alongside the A4 road to Devizes!

Next up, a couple of hundred metres back along the A4 (where we should have gone first but we blinked and missed the sign) was a small parking area for the West Kennett Long Barrow. An extraordinary place - a massive burial mound that has been dated to 3500 BC. When excavated it was found to contain 50 skeletons. Those interments actually took place over a couple of generations, but descendants could enter and pay homage for a thousand years before it was eventually sealed.

To get to West Kennett Long Barrow, you have negotiate with a barky Springer Spaniel, a herd of Brown's cows and close to a kilometre of canola.

Once you get to the top of the hill, there it is. I cannot get over how such ancient monuments are still part of the landscape, with life going on around them, as it has done for thousands of years. Quite a number of finds have been excavated on the West Kennett site and we plan to visit the Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes to see them.

                                                             A couple more shots at West Kennett Long Barrow - this one is inside. There were five burial chambers - this is the 'hallway'.



Pic below is a better shot of the entrance to the burial chambers. West Kennett Long Barrow is linked to Avebury Stone Circle, Silbury Hill and other ancient sites in the area by a series of avenues, often marked out by sarsen stones, but only a few of the stones survive .

All the surviving stone monuments at Avebury and West Kennett were built from sarsen quartzite sandstone, quarried on the Marlborough Downs, where we're staying.
Unlike Stonehenge, the stone used for Avebury area monuments was not crafted in any way. But Avebury builders did choose diamond shapes (child-bearing hips!) to represent females and straight up and down stones to represent males.

Pic below was taken from the top of West Kennett Long Barrow:

That's Silbury Hill in the centre. About a kilometre behind that is the massive Avebury stone circle, which I will rhapsodise about imminently. (Or Geoff will, given he reckons I only let him talk about beer and dead badgers on the motorway.)

We also checked out an area called 'The Sanctuary' which at first had us terribly excited, described as it was as being two ancient and concentric stone and timber circles, also just off the A4. But when we got there, we found that the stone and timber circles had been 'recreated' using small concrete bricks, as none of the originals had survived. Ah well. But again, this place was only a spit from West Kennett Long Barrow, two spits from Silbury Hill and three spits from Avebury, and so very much a part of the area's rich tapestry.

I am now going to hand over to Mr Snorkypants to discuss our exploration of the Avebury stone circle(s). Given he climbed a massive tree to get this aerial shot, I think he deserves his moment in the sun.

For those of you who believe the massive tree story I'm happy to accept the credit. For the rest of you unbelievers, we figured that it's just not possible to do Avebury justice via ground level photos. So, yes we cheated just a little bit and used somebody else's. [NB Just the one. - Ed] Hopefully you can see that there is indeed a huge circular ditch with standing stones immediately inside it. For an idea of its size I defer to experts who say it's 348 meters in diameter and is the largest stone circle in the world. Or I could point out that, as the photo indicates, there's an entire village in the middle of it.

This one indicates the size of some of the stones, and the fact that there is a village in the middle of it. It includes a pub (of course), which is advertised as the only place in the world you can get a drink inside the middle of a stone circle. How about that? The exact purpose of the stone circle arrangement has been lost in the mists of centuries and is in any case debated, but the popular view is that it was purely ceremonial, or devotional. And as you can see some of the stones are huge, so the builders needed to try really hard to create it, not to mention the exertions of the poor buggers whose job is was to lug them there and install them. [My relatives! - Ed]

We wandered around the circumference of the circle for an hour or more. Here are some favourite photos from our visit.

See how hard it is to show from ground level that it's circular? But it is, and you can hopefully see the ditch too.

We're not the only ones who are impressed by the stones. These few words and photos don't come close to doing it justice. A truly wonderful experience, and you're mad if you don't visit if you're in this neck of the woods.

After returning to the metropolis that is Ogbourne St George, we decided to follow the owner's recommendations to explore The Ridgeway, which is billed as England's oldest road. It's actually 87 miles long, and fortunately for us we can access part of it from near our digs. So we spent a pleasant hour and a bit exploring it ...