Avebury Standing Stones

Years ago I went to Stonehenge, it's a circle of big stones you pay a lot of money to not get any where near and be barged around by lots of tourists with large cameras on whistle stop bus tours.  It's a shit experience and I've never wanted to go back.

I have always wanted to go to Avebury though, and on the way to our spring holiday this year we stopped off for a look.  Now the nice thing about Avebury is it's not bigged up.  There is no 'experience' to be a draw to the buses.  It's just a bunch of very old stones.

They start quite a long way from the main village, like a road leading up to the circles.  These are 5000 years old Neolitic/Bronze age stones.  Placed for a reason.

There is an 'air' about this place, the feeling you get when thousands of people have taken a spiritual journey to get here.  It is the same shiver I get when at Canterbury Cathedral or Walsingham.  The ghosts of millenia walking onward.

Parts of the Fosseway or the Ridgeway (which starts here) make me feel that way too, shook by real history...people just like me, doing what I am doing.  Here and then gone.  The stones stayed the people just suggested by the winds of time.

Anyhoo...Avebury...it's huge.  Why on earth people decided to build a village in the middle of it who knows, but at least the village is better than the main road that roars past Stonehenge!  We really don't look after history in this country, maybe there's too much of it to care too much!








So these stones are just there, you can walk around them, touch them, lean on them, feel their energy.















The ditch goes all around it.









The size isn't to be underestimated.   This picture is an inner circle.  Look at the people next to the stones.

There is something special here.

Look at the roots of these trees.

The branches were covered in prayer ribbons.

It was like something from the Hobbit.
















The whole place is amazing (and free).



















And of course, every which way you turn there is a stone.

As we drove away we saw the Westbury chalk horse on a hillside, I need to come back to this area with more time and more knowledge and really get to know it.