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Avebury

Much in Little

There are landscapes that demand stillness, where it’s enough to simply stand and absorb the past all around you. Do these places have some other-worldly power, some mystical vibration? I think not, although I know many will differ from that view. I’m a rationalist and I think it somehow demeans places – and indeed people – to ascribe to them supernatural forces. The magic, I believe, comes from acknowledging and understanding the depth of human engagement with such places over time. In this, the stone circles and henges of Avebury always draw me back.

Stone and timber circles are mostly found in the British Isles, but they also occur in western France and in parts of Scandinavia. Henges, which get their name from Stonehenge, are a more specialized form of circle that developed in the British Isles. They consist of a circular ditch with an external bank, which is broached by at least one entranceway, although some monuments may have two, or even four. The placing of the bank outside the ditch contrasts with the construction of Iron Age hillforts and strongly suggests that henges were never defensive. More likely, the ditch marks the edge of a sacred area and congregations could have viewed the ceremonies taking place within the stone circles from the external bank. Most henges were built in the late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age – roughly between 3000 and 1500 BC.

Avebury is the largest henge of all and is also one of the best preserved. Like most of the larger henges, including Stonehenge and those we have just visited in Orkney (the Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar), Avebury sits at the centre of a complex ceremonial and religious, or ‘ritual’, landscape. As is usually the case, henges form the latest and last stage in the evolution of these ritual landscapes, which mostly go out of use shortly after 1500 BC. But what makes the place so relevant, for me, is the fact that it is still part of the community. Local people don’t treat it as an ancient, remote relic. It is part of their world, with a small hamlet, including a pub, at its centre. Despite the presence of the village, the features of the henge are still remarkably well preserved and have clearly been treated with respect through the ages. Many of the standing stones are still intact. The site has never been extensively ploughed, nor quarried, and its encircling ditch and bank are still spectacular.

Avebury sits in the rolling chalk hills of the Marlborough Downs, some ten miles south of Swindon. It is surrounded by prehistoric sites, such as the slightly older West Kennet Long Barrow and the much earlier ceremonial site, in fact a precursor of henges, the so-called Causewayed Enclosure, on Windmill Hill. Today Avebury is shaded by tall beech trees that can be seen from some distance across the open downland fields. But you know you have arrived somewhere unique as soon as the road passes through the outer ditch.

That massive ditch was dug out by people using antler picks, bone shovels and baskets to carry the chalk blocks up to the surface, to form the bulk of the great bank that runs around the outside of the ditch. The labour involved was prodigious, but – contrary to what some would have you believe – these stones weren’t raised by the command of a powerful leader. Rather, the impetus came from the oldest and most important element in any human community: the family. Recent research has suggested that many monuments of the early third millennium BC were built by groups of people who worked in discrete groups. It misses the point to think of this as ‘gang labour’ in the modern sense of the word, for there was nothing regimented or forced about it. People carried out their tasks because they wanted to; it was part of being a member of a clan or family. Working at Avebury might well have marked an important stage in a person’s life: maybe a young man’s transition from adolescence to adulthood. It would have been a rite of passage.

So while Avebury is a massive, majestic place, it was conceived and built at a very human scale. Certainly, major festivals would have taken place there 5,000 years ago, but the great outer stone circle was never constructed to dwarf, or to over-awe – unlike, for instance, the soaring spire of nearby Salisbury Cathedral, which seems to transcend mere humanity. Avebury remains firmly rooted in the prehistoric here-and-now.

I have a soft spot for Avebury for other reasons, too. I recall the tiny figure of Isobel Smith, late the curator of Avebury Museum, standing in the museum’s doorway, very shy and reserved but nearly always smiling. It was Isobel, who had been deeply involved with the famous pre-war excavations at Avebury, who guided my journey into the Neolithic when I began my own work in the early 1970s.1 Isobel, for me, was Avebury: modest and warm-hearted, but enormously helpful. Where Stonehenge and the great monuments of Orkney dominate in their treeless landscapes, Avebury is very different; it is slow to reveal its many secrets. You have to walk, observe and search to discover.

A mile and a half north-west of Avebury village – an easy walk, even after a good lunch at the pub – is Windmill Hill. You can find windmill hills everywhere in Britain, for obvious reasons. This one, however, is noteworthy not for its absent windmill, but for an extraordinary set of earthworks positioned slightly off the crown of the hill itself. These were first dug a very long time ago: around 3700 BC, to be more precise. Windmill Hill is not the only site of its type and age to be placed slightly off-centre – whether on a hill, or in a bend in a river – and many people, myself included, have suggested that this indicates that the place itself was considered sacred before the site was put there. People did not want their new communal shrine to dominate such a hallowed spot.

Windmill Hill consists of a strange arrangement of ditches surrounding an open space. The ditches are dug in short lengths, separated by undug ‘causeways’, which give this class of site its archaeological name: causewayed enclosures. Sadly, many causewayed enclosures in lowland Britain were positioned near the settlements they served, in river valley floodplains, and have since been damaged or destroyed by gravel quarries. They are, however, truly fascinating monuments and the well-preserved Windmill Hill, in its rural setting, is one of the most atmospheric. Essentially, these enclosures were probably tribal meeting grounds, where the separated communities of a region came together to exchange goods, barter for new livestock and maybe even to meet new wives and husbands.

For me, this remote part of the Avebury complex holds a special significance. In Britain, larger settlements started to become permanent fixtures in the landscape from around 4000 BC, with the arrival of farming. Very often, the new settlements were positioned close by one of the many causewayed enclosures that were just starting to be built. The enclosures were often positioned on land that wasn’t suitable for arable farming, and we assume that the people who built and used them lived in the nearby settlements. But why on earth were the ditches dug in short segments, separated by causeways? The answer, which has important implications for the construction of Avebury and other henges over half a millennium later, lies in the organization of the workforce.

I have suggested that each of those many short lengths of ditch that you can still see on Windmill Hill represents a single, long-forgotten, Neolithic clan or family. This was the gang or group of people who dug the ditch segment, then filled it with religious offerings. I have excavated a similar site, which revealed copious evidence for family life: pots, flint tools and millstones for grinding corn, often carefully arranged in the ground in neat, discrete heaps, or offerings. I suspect each offering told its own story: marriage, maybe, or childbirth. So when I look at those little ditches at Windmill Hill my mind conjures up images of long-gone family gatherings: crying babies, the squeals of young children, grumpy granddads and doting parents. Those lengths of ditch may have been the focus for family gatherings, but they also provided the social cement that kept communities together. In many ways I see them as the equivalents of the family pews that were such a feature of Victorian and older rural churches.

All ancient societies attached great importance to life’s rites of passage, the ultimate, of course, being death. If Avebury is at the centre of its ritual landscape, with Windmill Hill at its north-eastern edge, the West Kennet Long Barrow is on its southern edge, just over a mile from Avebury.2 Like Windmill Hill, this is a monument to family life, but here the evidence survives in the stone-lined chambers of a large communal tomb, where bodies were laid for their final rest. These chambers are buried beneath a massive, carefully constructed mound. The Neolithic view of death, however, was less absolute than ours today. The spirits of the ancestors were believed to have played an active part in the affairs of the living, and, indeed, there is good archaeological evidence that on important occasions families extracted bones, maybe even entire skeletons, from their small chambers within the tomb. They were then taken out and displayed, before being returned.3

The people buried within the West Kennet Long Barrow would have worshipped and attended ceremonies at Avebury. They would have lived in the Marlborough Downs, just outside the sacred site of Avebury itself, and would have built, maintained and understood it well. Being practising farmers they would have understood the subtleties of the land and how best it could be used. Their family farms and holdings may well have been hundreds of years old by the time the great stones were erected. These were people steeped in the landscape in which they lived and moved, a landscape that they moulded to fit their lives and the way they saw their position in the world. At Avebury you can still sense their fondness for what was, and remains, a very special place.