Heritage > Historic Places

Avebury

In the 17th Century John Aubrey noted that Avebury surpassed Stonehenge 'as a Cathedral doth a Parish Church'. Sir Richard Colt was also much more impressed and wrote, in 'Ancient Wiltshire' (1812) 'With awe and diffidence I enter the sacred precinct of this hallowed sanctuary, the supposed parent of Stonhenge, the wonder of Britain and the most ancient, as well as the most interesting relict which our island can produce'. Avebury's earthworks are by far the most impressive today, they contain the largest megaliths in Britain and the stone circle is the largest of it's kind in Europe. The area has been inhabited by villagers for about 1000 years and so it comes as a surprise that it remained undiscovered until Aubrey rode through the village one day on a hunting trip in 1648.

The building of Avebury began in about 2600BC or about 2000 yeasr after the first farmers reached Wessex. They chose a lowland plain at the foot of the Marlborough Downs. Like most henges, the site is close to water, in this case the infant river Kennet.

Using Antlers as picks, the shoulder-bones of cattle as spades and woven baskets as buckets the gangs of workers dug out the ditch and threw up the bank outside. The precise shape was not important. It would have been easy to define an exact circle with a rope streched tight from the centre, it seems that the priests that first marked out the sacred enclosure were quite content to pace a shapeless ring. If the geometry was unimportant then the sheer scale was obviously pretty vital. 120,000 cubic metres of solid chalk was dug up from the ditch at Avebury, a volume about 60 times the size of that from Stonhenge. Only one earthwork can com,pare to the size of Avebury and that is the 250,000 cubic metres of chalk that was dug up to form Silbury Hill. It is interesting that the two largest Neolithic earthworks in Europe both end up being part of the same ritual landscape in Wessex.

It has been estimnated that there were a minimum of 247 standing stones used in the main Stone circle and another 400 used in the building of the two avenues outside. The heaviest remaining megalith, the Swindon Stone near the North Entrance, weighs about 65 tonnes but the survivors average at 15 tonnes. The Avebury stones are sarsens of the same geographical type as those from Stonehenge. At Avebury the sarsens were selected for their shape and used in their natural state. Whereas at Stonehenge they were laboriously worked on to precise geometry. The Avebury builders preferred their stones to be either columnar or flat with a square or triangular outline.

It is natural to wonder just how stones of this size were selected and then transported from their original location to the Avebury site. Given that this would have been around 2400 BC then the given technology would suggest that rollers would seem the most likely method of transportation. Once at their site the stones would have been guided into a small socket in the ground (only 1m deep). Lined with wooden stakes which helped guide the stone into place ropes wooden pulleys and levers would have been employed to move the stone so that it stood vertical in it's socket. Great care was taken to make sure that the stone's centre of gravity was directly above the hole and then it would have been packed with more chalk and smaller stones.

While Stonehenge seemed to have been dedicated to the worship of the sun and the moon Avebury seems to have been strongly connected with the themes of fertility and life and death. Rich evidence of funerary feasts has been found at the sanctuary, which was linked by a procession route (West Kennet Ave) to the henge. The columnar and triangular stones were paired off together and such strong sexual symbolism seems to imply a close connection between fertility and funerary rites. This celebration of the cycle of birth, life and death was a central part of Neolithic philosophy. We could conclude tha`t the rites at Avebury were intended to bring life to the dead and good fortune to the living.



What colour are you?

All designs © Knight International Bulgarian Property Specialist 2001 - 2007