HENGE

I spent some time in Wiltshire to explore the megalithic landscape and I started with Stonehenge which I had previously only ever glimpsed from the road. Any hopes I had of there being few people there on a damp October Monday afternoon were dashed when I saw the number of cars and buses parked there, and the vast visitor centre which dwarfs the henge itself. You hear people saying how small Stonehenge seems but this may be because most visitors tend to take the shuttle bus to the main circle and focus on that and not look beyond the inner stones. There is a whole landscape to discover – I walked up to see the striking cursus bank and its dramatic barrows, and then walked back via a small wood.

It’s undoubtedly impressive. We’re looking at huge blocks of stone dragged over 20 miles, shaped or ‘dressed’ and then positioned, not to mention the outer ring of bluestones which were brought from south west Wales – there’s no doubt Neolithic people weren’t short of ambition. The bump on the top of the tall stone above is a tenon – to think these people knew mortise and tenon joinery! Lots of field studies have produced evidence of when they were built, where the stones came from and how they got there but nobody knows for sure why. Assuming they were built for a purpose it is most likely they are sacred sites for rituals or honouring the dead. Stonehenge lines up with the winter and summer solstice sunrises and the annual celebrations held on these dates even now are probably much more in keeping with the original intentions than the over-curated and dry experience it’s been turned into now. I wish I lived a bit nearer so that I could take part.

The day after I went to a very wet Avebury. I started at the suitably moody West Kennett long barrow (which predates Stonehenge by 1000 years) and then across the road to the mad-looking Silbury Hill which is most likely early Bronze Age. It would have been exposed chalk originally which would have made it stand out even more, but nobody knows why it was built – excavations haven’t even found any evidence of burials. A short walk from here takes you to Avebury itself and immediately you get all the atmosphere that has been erased at Stonehenge by its disney-fication. This giant ring of stones and its dramatic bank and ditch encircle a pretty little village. You can get right up to the stones and touch them, get a much better sense of history and connect with the ancients.

Afterwards I walked to Marlborough even though I was sodden – I told someone in Avebury my plan and she said ‘Madam, are you mad?’. But I really wanted to see the fields of sarsen stones that supplied both Stonehenge and Avebury and I found a whole area of scattered blocks of them, shattered and dumped during the Ice Age. It’s very dramatic and worthy of a visit alongside the positioned stones themselves. I had hoped to find the ‘polissoir’ that has cuts left behind by the Neolithic and Bronze Age people where they sharpened their stone axes, but I was too wet and cold to deviate too far from the path. I will definitely come back again when the weather is better and I have more time.