A Visit to Avebury

A Visit to Avebury
The following is an excerpt from a 45 page report I wrote after a three week trip to the British Isles in 1998. It concerns a visit to Avebury and the Great Circle of Stones and Ceremonial Grounds of ancient Britons who lived in the region now called Marlborough Downs where the Neolithic natives pitched their culture and religion.
The landscape approaching Avebury was truly spectacular, great vistas of green rolling hills and vast lowlands with small clusters of trees scattered throughout the Downs. “Downs” is an English expression to describe an expanse of open, high, grassy land, usually with rolling hills, which for the most part are used as pasture for sheep. The first ritual image of the Neolithic culture that we saw from the car was the “Westbury White Horse” on the side of a distant hill. Seeing it from far away it was hard to judge its true dimensions, but it was obviously huge. This particular earthwork, to use a contemporary term for such art work, was created in 1788, replacing a much older and smaller figure on the same spot. The horse gleamed in the rich green landscape, its whiteness the product of the local bedrock, chalk, a geological formation that covers a vast area of southern Britain. The topsoil was scraped away revealing the white chalk below. It played a role in the Great Stone Circle too. Avebury was an awesome experience for my wife and I, as we have been haunted by the place ever since. The site was the hub of a pre-historic complex of ceremonial spaces, ancient stone avenues, and burial chambers. Stonehenge, which is twenty miles south of Avebury, was smaller in scale and was constructed 100 years after Avebury. The older site was finalized in 2600 B.C., with parts of it being even older. Perhaps Stonehenge was a variation on a theme of an earth/sky animistic religion, as it seemed to be built specifically for astronomical purposes, hence why it was smaller and less grand in concept. In contrast, Avebury was more like a Grand Cosmic Design, if you will, a Mandala dedicated to the Great Goddess and her fertility rites; also a place for ceremonial rites, the main theater for their animistic religion, where the bones of the ancient dead had a place in the ongoing culture. It continued in use for 700 years, double the time of American history. It was contemporary with the stepped pyramid of Zoser in Saqqara, Egypt. One major scholar of Avebury called it “the colossus of pre-history,” as it is a huge complex of several hundred acres, spreading laterally to the west and ends there in Silbury Hill, a cone-shaped, man-made mountain at the termination of one of the long avenues. So far no one has divined to purpose of the hill; it is not where the dead are buried; perhaps it was simply a marker of some kind. It is 130 feet high, the largest megalithic structure in Europe, about the same size as the small pyramids of Egypt.
That same scholar wondered why Stonehenge has received greater attention and renown than Avebury. The identical thought crossed my mind as I experienced the power of the place. The concept of the place was thrilling to a symbologist like me; it resonated just like, for example, The Tibetan Wheel of Life. It was the pivotal site, the original ‘sacred ground’ of the local peoples.
The massive circular embankment and deep ditch that surrounds the Great Stone Circle was dug with what passed for a shovel in those days, the shoulder bone of animals. The dirt was piled up to make a bank around the ditch, which was more of the gleaming white chalk. The sides were twenty feet deep and it was approximately 1400 feet across. The whiteness of the ditch made a vivid contrast with the grey and green on the environment. The outer circle contained 98 standing stones that were 10 to 20 feet in length and weighted on average 20 ton. The largest stone in the bunch, which is still intact, was 65 ton. Unlike the stones at Stonehenge, which were worked and shaped, those at Avebury were raised as is. Inside the Great Stone Circle were two smaller circles, side by side, one to the north composed of 27 stones, the other to the south made of 29 stones. The two long avenues that that fed into the ritual area were probably lined with 400 stones. Of the approximately 600 stones used at the site only 76 are still standing. The site remained intact throughout the Roman occupation, when the place was a popular tourist attraction for Romans. A Saxon village sprang up inside the Great Circle, but it wasn’t until Medieval times when the damage to the stones began to occur, as the Christians weren’t to tolerate or sympathetic with the expression of their pagan brothers. They had a fear of pagan worship and gave the huge stones names like “The Devil’s Brandirons,” “The Devil’s Chair” and “the Devil’s Quoits.” For me, some who once taught Art History, it was sad to realize what had happened and that it showed such little respect for the evidence of what came before; but the Christian zealots could not abide the evidence of a previous religion so future generations could see what a fully articulated Neolithic temple was like.
Before we drove over to Silbury Hill and then on to Salisbury Cathedral, we had lunch at a new restaurant on the grounds of the Village. Guess what the name of the place was? “The Stones”-what else could it be? To the surprise and delight of my family, they severed the most delicious hot vegetarian food and delectable sweets. Nasima was ecstatic over the quality of the food.