Visiting Avebury Henge and prehistoric musings
I brushed up on human pre-history over a cheese and quince paste breakfast. We were going to visit the Avebury Henge and I wanted to be vaguely informed. I went back about 500,000 years and started working my forward. The Henge was constructed in 3000 BC – making the site 5000 years old. The henge contained a number of nested circles made up of huge rocks – all running through a ‘modern’ village. The site was added to over a time period of 1000 years. An outer circle was added as well as a boulevard of huge stones acting as an entryway extending over a mile from the site. As a prehistoric person visiting this region, you knew early that ‘this was the place’!
If you stood in the midst of the boulevard of stones on the crest overlooking the approach to the great nested circles of stones sitting in a huge earthworks henge and looked north you’d spot the enormous Uffington White Horse decorating the distant hillside. If you looked to the south you’d see the Silbury Hill – one of the tallest man-made hills.
Yep – this was the place. Some seriously productive folks lived here!
I reflected on our visits to the cathedrals and thought about the time span in which they were created and the people of the times intention for creating them. People have been in the cathedral making business for about 600 years and how they are used has altered significantly. The role and power of the church changed over time, plumbing and electric lights were added, and the community began using them in different ways – 12 step groups, community action committees now use them as much or more so than the worshippers. They still act as a place of religion, but they have become places of community culture as well.
I had thoughts about the evolution of the Avebury site along those same lines.
It’s conceivable that after 1000 years of building a gigantic religious site that everyone in the region would still be using it, but perhaps in different ways. Maybe it became more about the human sacrifice…or less. People may have gotten practical about allowing concession stands on-site. Seminar series and lectures in small outbuildings: “Making it in the new agrarian world: leaving the hunter/gatherer behind”?
The stones were pretty impressively large but what struck me equally impressive were the earth works around the circle. The builders moved staggering amounts of dirt…using deer antlers as a shovel.
All of it an impressive feat – almost inconceivable in an era that had just invented ‘the planting stick’…although I had to pull on some first-hand knowledge from having a lot of boys in my life. They can move a lot of huge rocks, dig enormous holes and move a staggering number of toys over long distances in short order. People have always been good at moving things and being driven by a competitive instinct to also be ridiculously over-the-top.
We spent a better part of 2 hours wandering through the rocks and letting them talk to us. I regurgitated all the archeological facts I had gleaned over breakfast to my family. Once we ran out of facts Kaety started pulling information from episodes of “Ancient Aliens’ she’d watched.
When we asked our teenaged daughter if she’d had a good time, she rolled her eyes and said, “Yay! Rocks!”
Tips for visiting the Avebury Henge and World Heritage Site:
I hate to say ‘this is better than that’, but I will say that if you want a more intimate and unconstrained visit to a henge the Avebury World Heritage Site is going to give you a better experience than visiting Stonehenge. It’s a pretty amazing place and it’s typically not clogged with large tour busses, you are allowed to wander among the stones at your own pace, and the village that sit intersect the henge offers easy refreshment to support your day of exploring the ancient artifacts and earthworks.
The larger Avebury World History Site is riddle with some serious pre-historic awesome. It is home to Silbury Hill, West Kennet Long Barrow, Windmill Hill and the Alexander Keiller Museum. It is easy to spend a day visiting each of these sites as they are just a couple of miles from each other.
This is a walking adventure. You are often walking up an unimproved path into what appears to be a farmer’s field. The directional signs aren’t big, the parking is unimproved and a little ad-hock, and the distances to ‘the good stuff’ are variable. If you keep following your nose to the next stone, you may find yourself on a delightful jaunt that has seperated you from your car by a mile or more.
If members of your party are mobility challenged, there are a number of large stones in the village center that are very easy to get to - the terrain being something akin to a slightly bumpy grass lawn with very little elevation gain.
