The Sanctuary, Avebury

The Sanctuary, an elaborate timber and stone monument, is part of the vast Avebury complex and was built on a promontory at the southern end of the West Kennett Avenue. The ancient trackway known as the Ridgeway passes adjacent to the site and the steep sloping hillside has a natural dominance over the surrounding area, attracts the focus for several miles, and seems a fitting location for the southern-most monument of the Avebury complex.

The route of the West Kennett Avenue leading up to the Sanctuary

Today, there is little at the site but concrete markers. The two concentric stone circles were destroyed in the 18^th century. The outermost was 40 metres in diameter, and they were built around 2500BC. This was the culmination of over a thousand years of activity at the site, and it seems the memory and sanctity of this was eventually immortalised.

The inner stone circle, 15 metres in diameter, was flanked by six concentric rings of oak posts, 1-6 metres in height, rising in height towards the centre. A single post stood in the centre. An entrance to the north-west roughly aligns with the point the West Kennett Avenue joins the monument. Other stone and post holes suggest more layers of complexity which are near impossible to interpret.

It’s believed the postholes represent a single structure rather than successive rebuilds, and it’s been suggested the posts may have supported horizontal wooden lintels, rather like at Stonehenge. The posts seem to have been regularly replaced, often long before they rotted, suggesting a dynamic function where the construction was more important than the finished structure. Deposits such as pottery and flint arrow heads in the postholes perhaps link to individuals or families who left part of their identity with the post they raised.

                                Churchyard yews.

Various theories have been proposed for the purpose of timber circles. One idea is that they reflect the growth of yew trees, which layer themselves and eventually form radial groves. Yews have an ancient sacred heritage and are still found in churchyards today. A venerated yew may even have grown near the circle. A large tree hole was actually found in the timber circle at Woodhenge.

An alternative theory is that the posts were linked with wattle screens to create a labyrinth or spiral path. Turf labyrinths and spiral paths such as at Silbury Hill and Glastonbury Tor would become of great importance in the millennia to come.

Avebury Monumental Complex

Avebury, a vast henge monument discussed last week, was developed into a far more elaborate complex during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. This is probably linked to the influx of a new people and culture from Europe who brought with them bronze-working technology and a vastly different way of life. It’s most likely the two cultures blended to form a new way of life and spiritual tradition. In this new world, individual wealth and power were becoming paramount.

Avebury’s two avenues, running from the south and west entrances, were built between 2600-2300BC; the early Bronze Age. There is no evidence for corresponding avenues for the other entrances.

The Beckhampton Avenue, now comprising only two stones, ran westwards along what is now Avebury High Street then curved southwest to the Longstones Enclosure, a causewayed enclosure created 600-800 years before the avenue itself. The enclosure had been long destroyed but its significance had remained in folk memory. Two long barrows, much earlier still, were also found nearby. Clearly the avenue’s builders were careful to include these ancient features built by their earliest ancestors.

The West Kennet Avenue runs southwards from Avebury to the Sanctuary, a stone and timber monument above the river Kennet. The serpentine route has been suggested to reflect the sinuous flow of a river, and it crosses the low-lying and once marshy ground around the Kennet before climbing the hillside to the Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is visible from almost all parts of the avenue, but Avebury itself is almost entirely hidden, suggesting the avenue may have been a processional path leading from Avebury to the Sanctuary rather than the other way around.

The West Kennet Avenue looking towards the Sanctuary.

Some of the stones had pottery, flint-working debris, human bones and sometimes entire burials at their base. People used the stones to mark graves, or to safeguard memories of lives or key events. Did individual families or settlements bring a stone from a place meaningful to them and raise it in the avenue, then leave gifts or loved ones’ remains at its base? The monument as a whole would then form a unified meld between all families and communities, strengthening relationships in a world where increasingly every person was for themselves.

Around this time, an unusual amount of human bones was deposited in Avebury’s ditches. This may have been ancestral remains from the now-ancient long barrows, which were closed for good around this time. Perhaps Avebury was a last haven for the old culture. Or perhaps people were sealing the memories of their past into its confines, so the land itself would remember them.

A nearby sarsen field. Stones with particular significance were taken to Avebury and incorporated into the monument.

Avebury now seems to be about memory and story. The avenues link several ancient features, including an ancient feasting site incorporated through a bend in the West Kennet Avenue, to tell a narrative history. I imagine people came to Avebury and processed from stone to stone in a communal remembrance of people and events, a commemoration of the histories of the places they passed, and their myths and legends of their existence.

Avebury Henge

Avebury henge in Wiltshire is Britain’s largest stone circle and formed part of a vast complex of monuments built and used over 2000 years. The story of its construction will perhaps never be fully understood.

It seems the earliest structure was a large wooden building, perhaps a house or hall which often featured at the earliest Neolithic settlements. After its demise it became the focus of a square arrangement of stones, now long removed. The building was perhaps built by the first settlers in the area, now revered ancestors, and was immortalised in memory as an example of ‘history-making’. This was eventually followed by the henge ditch and bank, then the huge outer stone circle with two smaller circles inside were raised, then finally two stone avenues were added.

The linear 'z-feature', with the south ring and the southern entrance stones beyond.

Avebury is in a natural ‘bowl’ surrounded by higher chalk ridges, one being the course of the ancient trackway called the Ridgeway. Although the henge is visible from the high ground all around, it’s surprisingly inconspicuous. Many stone circles are prominent in their landscape, designed to be seen, which suggests a different reason for Avebury’s location or purpose. Although, perhaps its size and therefore importance and fame meant it didn’t need to advertise itself. Inside the monument, little is visible of the outside world and it gives the impression of being an enclosed ‘microcosm’. It has often been suggested that circular monuments surrounded by a water-filled ditch are a microcosm of the earth with its surrounding ring of water.

Avebury comprises a circular ditch with an outer bank, 330m in diameter. The ditch was originally nine metres deep; a phenomenal undertaking using only antler picks. It was dug around 2900BC, replacing an earlier, more modest ditch. The stone circle inside comprised 98 huge sarsen stones, weighing up to 100 tonnes, many of which were destroyed or buried during Medieval times. Two smaller circles, around 100m diameter, were built inside the monument, and a variety of other stone features whose original layout and purpose remains unclear. Four causewayed entrances, slightly offset from the cardinal points, are the locations for the modern roads.

The two very different Cove stones in the northern circle.

Avebury’s earliest phase of construction was during the early Neolithic period, but intriguing evidence suggests its importance began long before this point. Many sacred sites in Britain, immortalised in stone during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, were respected by the earlier hunter-gatherers who had populated Britain after the Ice Age. Neolithic settlers, or hunter-gatherers who adopted the farming lifestyle, built these monuments around natural features whose importance was perhaps known to a few and now forgotten or ignored by most. Groves, springs or rock features became an immortalised memory.

Avebury’s biggest sarsen stones, such as the now-destroyed Obelisk in the southern circle, the Cove Stone in the northern circle, and some of the entrance stones, are believed to have been naturally present, in contrast to the majority of the stones which were dragged into place from the nearby downs. Were they subject to millennia-old veneration and the reason for the henge’s location? Intriguingly, some stones at Stonehenge and Stanton Drew are also believed to have been raised in their natural locations, and the capstones of many portal dolmens were also raised in their original positions.

Avebury also incorporated more recent ‘history-making’. Several stones in the monument had been used, perhaps for centuries, as axe-polishing stones or polissoirs while they lay in their natural positions on the downs. These stones with their own histories and stories were then brought to Avebury and incorporated into the vast, story-telling monument.

British culture changed dramatically when people began to master and control their landscape, by clearing forests and growing crops and also by raising monuments which would exist for millennia, but I believe Avebury shows its seed lay in the earlier respect for the natural landscape of people who walked lightly on the land and whose presence left little trace behind.

The northern entrance stone, one of the huge sarsens probably respected for millennia before it was raised.

Windmill Hill

Windmill Hill is the earliest site of the Avebury complex. A causewayed enclosure was built on the hill between 3670-3620BC. This comprised three concentric, ovoid ditches with inner banks and regular causeways to give access.

The ditches are not focused on the hilltop. They are offset to the northeast and the outermost, being 360m in diameter, stretches almost to the bottom of the slope. The reason for this is unclear, but it seems the ditches were designed to enclose pre-existing features such as ritual or offering pits. The ditches may also have respected natural features such as ancient trees which have vanished without archaeological trace. The banks and ditches are almost entirely eroded away; what is visible today is the result of excavation and restoration in the 1930s.

View east from Windmill Hill. The restored ditch is visible in the foreground.

The site was used for occasional feasting – large numbers of cattle were slaughtered and eaten on the site – and was perhaps a site for annual gatherings and trade events over a period of around three hundred years. It attracted people from across Britain; pottery from Cornwall and stone axes from Cumbria have been found. Bones from thousands of cattle, pigs, sheep and dogs were carefully deposited in the ditches after feasting events. Cattle skulls were placed in the ditches flanking the entrances. Disarticulated human bones suggest the deposition of revered ancestors, possibly from barrows such as the nearby West Kennet long barrow. In all, the site was a key part of Neolithic spiritual and practical life with a depth we shall probably never understand.

Bronze Age barrow and ditch. The sheep indicate its size.

Windmill Hill was probably chosen because it is the most prominent natural feature of the relatively flat landscape around Avebury, which stretches south and east to the steep escarpments of the chalk downs. The wide, flat hill offers 360º views, including the sites which would one day become the Avebury henge and Silbury Hill.

The site retained its importance long after the enclosure was abandoned and the ditches filled in. The later Neolithic monuments were arranged below it, perhaps so the ‘founding fathers’ could watch over them, and several Bronze Age barrows were erected on the hill, over two thousand years later, including one on the highest point which now dominates the hillside.

Unlike the more famous monuments, Windmill Hill is now largely forgotten and sees few visitors except sheep.

The River Thames

It's interesting how a river can have a personality, and how that personality can survive through millennia and countless waves of incoming people.
The Thames is Britain’s most important river. Today it is a reflection of Britain’s commercial might as it flows through the heart of London, and for millennia it has been central to trade, defence, invasion, sustenance and ritual.

‘Thames’ is perhaps Britain’s oldest place name. It derives from Tamesis, the name recorded by the Romans, which has a pre-Celtic origin and means ‘dark’. This is in common with other river names including the Thame, a tributary of the Thames, and the Tamar in Cornwall. Its flow is typically muddy and it is tidal for a large stretch of its course. 'Dark' may also reflect its spirit, which even now is said to demand human lives each year, to suck swimmers inexplicably beneath its surface, and to whisper to people on its banks and entice them to jump. 

The confluence of the Thames and the Windrush in Oxfordshire

The river's importance far predates the Romans who founded Londinium. The Thames has one of the highest densities of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments of any British river. These include the great henge monuments of Stanton Harcourt near Oxford, the Dorchester Rings, and the henges under the city of Oxford and at Abingdon. Many of these were situated at confluence points, which were perhaps used strategically for their landmark value or symbolically as a meeting point of waters and people.

The Devil's Quoits at Stanton Harcourt

The source of the Thames is disputed but often said to be at Seven Springs in Gloucestershire. The river Kennet which flows through Wiltshire is one of its earliest tributaries, and is suggested by some to be the original ‘source’ river. The Kennet is sourced at the springs which surround the world-famous monuments of Avebury and Silbury Hill. Perhaps some of these monuments’ prestige came from their location at Britain’s watery heart.

The ritual importance predates even the Neolithic period. Large numbers of human skulls and other bones, along with stone axes and tools, were deposited in the waters of the Thames during the Mesolithic period, long before the first farmers arrived. There is increasing evidence that many of Britain’s sacred sites had a sanctity thousands of years older than previously realised.

                 The River Kennet

Many rivers have a female identity. The Thames is one of the few that is considered male. ‘Old Father Thames’, a bearded old man, has long been the personification of the river. It is often linked to the Egyptian Goddess Isis. The Thames at Oxford is called ‘Isis’. This is suggested to be a cult brought by the Romans, or an esoteric mystery cult of much greater antiquity, but in fact this is a much more recent name, probably coined by Oxford students in the Medieval period, and is a truncation of the Latin ‘Tamesis’.

Unusually, there is little more folklore associated with this mysterious and long-revered river.

            Old Father Thames

Tintagel Castle

Tintagel Castle is precarious on a near sheer promontory, almost now an island, on the wave- and wind-battered north Cornish coast. More is known about Tintagel’s legends than its history; it is famous as the birthplace of King Arthur.

According to legend, Tintagel was the castle of Gorlois, a Cornish Duke. Gorlois’s wife, Igraine or Ygerna, was much desired by the powerful and ruthless Uther Pendragon. During a battle between Uther and Gorlois’s armies, the wizard Merlin disguised Uther in Gorlois’s form. Uther rode to Tintagel, seduced the unsuspecting Igraine, and nine months later she gave birth to Arthur, Britain’s greatest hero.

Other supporting legends grew up around Tintagel. Merlin’s Cave is a 100m-long sea cave which runs all the way under Tintagel. This was where, as described in Tennyson’s 19^th century poem Idylls of the King, Merlin found the baby Arthur washed up at his feet and raised him until he became king. The cave is accessible at low tide and is an eerie place with the booming surge of the sea echoing along its length. Folklore states if you take a stone from the cave you will have good luck. But woe betide if you take two!

                                   Merlin's Cave

The Arthur connection has traditionally been dismissed as fairytale by historians. The ruined castle visible today is a 13^th century fort built by the Earl of Cornwall, 700 years after Arthur’s time. But excavations in recent years have found evidence of a settlement dating to the late Roman period and a century or two afterwards, precisely the time Arthur supposedly lived. Archaeological finds suggest a high status settlement, perhaps home to a powerful warlord or a ruler of the kingdom of Dumnonia. Red slip pottery was imported from Africa and wine amphorae from the Mediterranean, present here in higher quantities than any other site in Dark Age Britain. It has been suggested Tintagel was a trading post, although the sheer cliffs and treacherous coastline appear an unlikely haven for trading ships.

The site is easily defensible, guarded by the cliffs, the sea and the narrow stretch of land which has to be crossed to reach it. Tintagel derives from the Cornish Din, meaning fortress, and tage, meaning choke, probably referring to the narrow access. It would make a good site for a powerful ruler.

            Archaeological work in 2017

The Arthur legend was written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12^th century, in The History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey claimed his work to be an accurate historical account, but it is generally now discredited as a blend of fact, myth and personal supposition.

But Geoffrey must have been inspired somehow. He claimed his work was factual so must have acquired supporting evidence, no matter how tenuous or fantastical, to back up his ideas. A legend likely survived of the great fortress at Tintagel, only a few hundred years before Geoffrey’s time, perhaps even of a great hero who was born here, and Geoffrey took that information and worked it into his story. Some of Geoffrey’s more outlandish ideas have been recently shown accurate. Perhaps his story about Tintagel will one day prove the same.

Devil’s Quoits Stone Circle

The Devil’s Quoits, a stone circle near Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire, was one of the bigger stone circles in Britain. Little of its original structure survived Medieval destruction and the construction of a Second World War airfield, and what is seen today is a near-entire reconstruction.

The 80-metre wide, slightly flattened circle today comprises 28 stones, originally 36, with an outlier outside the circle to the south-southeast. Folklore states that the devil was playing quoits one Sunday on nearby Wytham Hill, the only prominent landmark in the area, and these stones are the result. They are local stone with a lot of gravel inclusions, of irregular shape, up to 2m in height. Most of those present today are replacements.

The stones are set inside a henge ditch with an outer bank, which probably predate the stone circle. The ditch was originally 7m wide and 2.5m deep, with two entrances to the west and east. As was standard practice, antler picks, presumably those used to dig the ditch, were laid in the bottom after work was finished. The ditch was dug around 2900BC or slightly later, with deposits of cattle bones and pottery continuing for the next thousand years.

The circle with the outlier. The bank is in the background.

The Devil’s Quoits is located on the entirely flat floodplain of the river Thames, which today is three kilometres to the south but in Neolithic times was probably a multitude of braided streams winding through a marshy landscape, flooded in winter and reasonably dry with a few flowing channels in summer. The confluence with the river Windrush is nearby.

Several great ritual complexes were sited along the Thames during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, almost all of them on confluence points. The Thames and its tributaries were of vital importance for travel and navigation when the land was still largely impenetrable forest with few roads or paths, and the river was also used for rituals, offerings and burial.

The confluence of the Thames and the Windrush.

The local landscape bears no resemblance to former times. Gravel extraction pits have left huge lakes, and mounds and banks have destroyed any natural features. In the original landscape, the huge site would have been a landmark for miles around and a focal point for journeys, gatherings and trade. It was a focus for Bronze Age burials long after its construction. Those which were excavated before their destruction revealed the graves of men, women and children, often with elaborate grave goods such as daggers and pottery vessels.

The western causeway.

The site was abandoned by the Iron Age and was extensively ploughed during the Roman period, although it remained a feature of local folklore, and the village name derives from ‘stone-town’. Gravel extraction during the past half-century has destroyed around sixty Bronze Age barrows, ring ditches which often surrounded burials, and other graves containing an unknown number of human bodies, which are now incorporated in roadworks and construction sites across the country. It’s perhaps a blessing that a small part of the site survives.