Avebury

Avebury is the stone circle you walk into rather than look at. A village grew up inside it, so the sarsens stand among cottages, a pub and grazing sheep. It is also the largest stone circle in Europe: the outer ring measures about 330 metres across and once held around a hundred great undressed stones, some weighing more than 40 tonnes. Around it runs a henge of staggering scale, a ditch dug about 11 metres into the chalk with antler picks and a bank that still rises some 9 metres. Even worn down by four and a half thousand years, the earthwork encloses the village like a green amphitheatre.

It was built over several centuries of the third millennium BC. The henge and the outer circle belong roughly to the period between 2900 and 2200 BC, and inside them stood two further rings, the northern one with a setting of three stones called the Cove at its centre. From the south-eastern entrance the West Kennet Avenue, a double line of paired stones ran south-east across the downs; a second avenue left from the western entrance. In 2017 a geophysical survey found traces of a square setting of stones inside the southern circle that may be the oldest structure on the site.

What you see today is partly the result of destruction and partly of repair. From the fourteenth century onwards villagers toppled and buried stones they saw as pagan; under one of them excavators in 1938 found the skeleton of a man with scissors and a lancet, known as the barber-surgeon, dated by his coins to around 1320. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the stones were broken up for building material by heating them with fire and splashing cold water on them. William Stukeley recorded the monument as it was being destroyed. In the 1930s the archaeologist and businessman Alexander Keiller bought the site, excavated it, re-erected buried stones and marked the positions of lost ones with concrete pillars, so that the rings can be read again. Look for these squat markers among the stones.

Avebury is now cared for by the National Trust and is part of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1986. It is the centre of a whole prehistoric landscape: Silbury Hill, the West Kennet Long Barrow and the causewayed enclosure of Windmill Hill are all within walking distance.

Getting there

Avebury lies in Wiltshire, about 15 km south of Swindon and roughly equidistant between Marlborough and Calne. The nearest airport is Bournemouth (BOH), about 72 km away. The nearest railway station is Swindon, a few minutes' walk from the bus station, where Stagecoach buses 42 and 49 run to Avebury in about half an hour, stopping outside the Red Lion pub in the middle of the circle.