18 June 2022

Avebury

On Monday, after we had gazed upon Silbury Hill, we walked a mile further to the village of Avebury.  It was good to arrive there on foot and not in a motor vehicle.

Almost five thousand years ago, our pagan ancestors began to construct something there - something that was quite amazing. It would have involved thousands of hours of manual labour and the project evolved over hundreds of years in different phases. This was in a time of hunting and gathering, before farming took a hold and changed the landscape forever.

It was a huge stone circle surrounded by ditches, a deep moat and tall embankments. There were also avenues of standing stones that led up to the stone circle. Beyond the shielding embankment were two smaller stone circles. This was not a place of burial but a place of pre-Christian ritual. We can only guess at what happened there for no one really knows. The mysteries will never be uncovered with any certainty.

Centuries later, as memories of the true purpose of the place faded away, an agricultural village grew up right next to the stone circle and some buildings were even constructed within the great circle. A minor road also bisected the sacred site. It seems that in the middle ages, people had little regard for our pre-Christian heritage. The established church  had a vested interest in ignoring, belittling or destroying such sites because they suggested an older and more fundamental way of regarding human existence.

©English Heritage
I guess we should be grateful that the villagers of Avebury did not obliterate the ancient site entirely. Though less visited than Stonehenge, seventeen miles to the south, Avebury still attracts a lot of visitors. We modern folk wander around feeling puzzled, unable to  comprehend what it is all about. What did they think? How did they speak?  What mattered to them?

27 comments:

  1. I feel like I have to search for history but you live among it!

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    1. We do but as I have said before, many of my fellow countrymen and women do not appreciate this wonder.

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  2. You know, there is a part of me which is grateful that there are still mysteries. This one is grand.

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    1. I doubt that the people who built Avebury stone circle wanted everything to be explained.

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  3. I wish there was some way to find out the answers to your questions. I would love a peek back into the past through a time machine. I don't want to go back there, just observe. I would love to see what colors dinosaurs actually were and if they all had feathers. What have we gotten wrong?

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    1. The main thing we have got wrong is to think that The Earth is our larder to be raided and exploited instead of seeing it as a sanctuary to be treasured and revered.

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  4. The photo from the air puts a different perspective on things. Yes, it's a tragedy that some of this was destroyed and the the story was lost.

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    1. It is the biggest stone circle in the world.

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  5. Do any of the stones have runes carved on them? They may have been raised to honour certain gods or ancestors, or perhaps as you suggest it was a sacred site for other reasons.

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    1. Maybe ancient people painted the stones white with lime that was freely available in the region. Who knows how far visitors walked to reach Avebury? So many mysteries.

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  6. There could be leylines under that ancient stone time machine? Our tides are dictated by the moon. These ancient people used the circles to measure the sun and the seasons. They were at one with nature,

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    1. Avebury lies on the very significant 'St. Michael's ley-line.

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  7. That walk from Silbury to the stone circle, I have done many times, hares, grouse and deer all met on the way. Along of course with neopagans later in the day who are still searching for that elusive ritual prehistoric religion. As if. A village within a circle and a very deep ditch dug by deer antlers!

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    1. How did they train the deer to do that?

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  8. It is certainly a fascinating place, and one can‘t help but wonder at the apparent carelessness of people having built houses there and roads through it.

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    1. They probably also used a lot of the stones as building material.

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  9. Avebury and places that go back even further always intrigue me. I would really like to know what went on there.

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    1. I rather like the fact that it can never be fully explained.

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  10. "If stones could speak..." :) We have quite a few old stone circles and 'stone ships' etc in Sweden too, with various theories attached. I too am fascinated by them. (Back in my youth I also visited Stonehenge on a family holiday trip in Britain.) Lovely photos in this post, I think they really capture that feeling of mystery.

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    1. I spent a few days in Sweden in the summer of 2001 and visited Ales stenar on the south coast. Very old but only half as old as Avebury stone circle.

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    2. YP I've been there, back in the 1990s. It's one of our biggest I think. Or with as many big stones still standing anyway.

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  11. It's on my list of places to go! Interesting to see your photos. I expected something more fully intact, but it's kind of cool that modern life is occurring right in the middle of an ancient ruin.

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    1. Cool and weird too. If only medieval men and women had cherished it.

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  12. It made me think how unimportant I am. 5000 years in the future - what will be left of our planet and will the beings wonder what in the heck were we doing?!

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    1. Upon that devasated orb, a few will cling on reading books about a beautiful green planet that was ruined by fools.

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  13. When I visited Avebury, I got a strange feeling, as if I was being watched by the people who built it. Very weird. I sensed an atmosphere there.

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    1. You have never struck me as someone who was prone to such spooky feelings so that makes it doubly weird.

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