By Professor Jasper Heathcoat-Beech
You may have noticed I teamed up with Professor Jasper Heathcoat-Beech this year to launch our History and Mystery Walks. We’ve been to Avebury and Stonehenge. Each walk has been a lovely, happy time with likeminded new friends. We do a lot of walking, plenty of talking, take quite a few photos and hear all about the amazing history and weird mysteries of the ancient stone circles of Wiltshire.
For many of you, it might be just too tricky to come with us for a multitude of reasons, but I don’t want you to miss out! I’ve already told you all about the ghosts, strange lights, time slips and fairy antics of Avebury before but I haven’t covered the history too deeply. But why re-invent the wheel?! I have the perfect person, with his usual style of bonhomie and fun, to tell you about the early history of Avebury. I’m honoured to say, it’s ‘The Professor’ himself!
Jeremy Mulhaire joined us on each of the walks this year and I have now nominated him History and Mystery Walk’s very own official photographer! Bar the ‘people’ photos and the Silbury Hill one below (taken by me), all of the images were taken by Jeremy. A very talented photographer! I’m honoured to feature them here.
So, without further ado…
Avebury: Squaring the Circle (A Very Personal View)
What pops into your head when someone mentions ‘the Stones’? Mick Jagger pouting and preening as he struts his stuff to the raucous riffing of ‘Brown Sugar’? Well, for me, those words are synonymous with one thing and one thing only: the stone circle of Avebury. This extraordinary place has, dare I say it, a magical quality that even Stonehenge – for all its stunning uniqueness and enigmatic, brooding brilliance – somehow can’t quite match.
Three reasons, I reckon. First there are the stones themselves: unlike the heavily ‘dressed’ sarsens at its fairly near neighbour, Avebury’s have an appealingly natural, unspoilt quality that means they almost seem to be sprouting out of the soil. Second, you can get genuinely ‘hands-on’ with the stones here. Third, the killer fact: the village itself has actually encroached into the circle. And that includes the Red Lion pub. Quite simply, no other Neolithic monument in the world allows you to enjoy a wide selection of competitively priced beers and lagers while tucking into a bowl of halloumi fries.
All of which makes Avebury a no-brainer of a venue for the History & Mystery Walks where I’ve teamed up with Emma to escort groups of the committed and companiable on epic treks around the local landscape – ludicrously healthy exercise that’s (hopefully) embellished by some reasonably discerning dollops of history from me and a spot of Emma’s trademark spooky stuff.
But when we’re talking about Avebury in an ancient sense – and as our H&M walkers are discovering! – it’s vital to recognise that it’s an awful lot more than ‘just’ a prehistoric stone circle (albeit the world’s biggest…) with a huge henge wrapped round it. We’re talking about a wide, complex landscape stretching in every direction and shaped during an absolutely pivotal phase in British history: the Neolithic period (or New Stone Age), which ran from 4000 to 2500 BC, and the very early Bronze (i.e. ‘Copper’) Age covering the following few centuries. I know this all sounds a bit dry and dusty, and can seem like a very long time ago. But believe me: the foundations of so much of who and what we are today were laid down back then. And the story of Avebury itself – of how and why this inspirational landscape evolved as it did – is fundamentally tied up in those events.
We’re talking about an era when Britain underwent two major, pretty root-and-branch population changes. The first of these saw Neolithic people, slowly and steadily, make the crossing from Europe and supersede the Mesolithic (or Middle Stone Age) hunter-gatherers who’d roamed these islands in the wake of the last Ice Age. And the Neolithic newbies had something really rather remarkable in their pull-along suitcases – a revolutionary way of life that still underpins the way we live today. Because they brought agriculture to Britain, thus securing the first steps in the long and winding road that ultimately led to ‘Clarkson’s Farm’.
Domesticated animals, domesticated crops, permanent settlements, pottery. The Neolithic period is where it all began. In terms of Avebury, these intrepid farming folk started leaving their calling-card on the landscape around 3700 BC, not least in the shape of the ‘camp’ up at Windmill Hill (used mainly for gatherings, festivals and feasting) and the iconic, now-restored West Kennet long barrow, where five stone chambers hosted the bones of dozens of the dead. The barrow’s interior, by the way, is a super-creepy place! If you’re in there on your own, you really don’t feel like you’re alone…
But it would be more than half a millennium before work started on what we really think of as ‘Avebury’ – the stones and the earthwork. In fact, the main ring of sandstone sarsens wouldn’t be built for another five hundred years after that. What actually came first, around 3000 BC, were two smaller stone circles – the scanty remains of which you’ll still find within the main circle – plus a fairly modest earthwork where the massive bank and ditch now stand. It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of what we see today is the result of restoration work carried out just before the Second World War. By that time, Avebury was in a hell of state, most of its stones having been toppled and buried in the Middle Ages (when they were seen as the Devil’s work) and/or broken up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they were ‘redeployed’ to build houses, barns, field walls and other stuff.
So, what exactly were those Neolithic guys up to? Well, it seems they were trying to recapture a bit of the old magic (so to speak) and tap into the aura of their founding fathers who’d first settled in this landscape all those centuries earlier. You see, all that farming malarkey hadn’t exactly been plain-sailing. Neolithic society had slipped into reverse gear. Sure, they continued to raise livestock – mainly cattle and pigs, as sheep-farming wouldn’t really return to Britain until the Bronze Age – but they stopped growing crops. The population started to shrink. Considerable portions of Neolithic Britain were under the cosh.
The big question is, why? Climate change? Possibly. But one theory now getting some decent traction is that it was all a question of crap. And by that I mean manure and its application to farmland. It seems the Neolithic people hadn’t yet quite worked out how much to apply, where and when. So crops yields went down, a lot of good-quality land fell out of use and people went back to relying on wild-growing cereals. They also seem to have started eating an awful lot of hazelnuts. Neolithic Nutella was definitely now on the shopping list.
The building mania at Avebury that started kicking in around 3000 BC, then, appears to have been largely a response to this ‘crisis’. Within the more southerly of the two mini stone circles was a square marked out by smallish standing stones. This seems to have been constructed around an old timber building that had fallen into decay. A massive stone obelisk was even erected slap-bang in the middle of where this building had stood. (Long vanished, the obelisk was still visible – though toppled – in the early eighteenth century before being smashed up and used for someone’s patio. Sort of.) Clearly, the aim was to commemorate whoever had once lived in the timber building. Maybe an individual. Maybe a powerful family or clan. Or maybe a specific event had occurred there, seen as critical to the history of the Neolithic people of Avebury.
The Cove’s two remaining mega-stones
In the centre of the more northerly mini-circle, meanwhile, three whopping sarsens were erected to form three sides of a kind of ‘box’, now dubbed ‘the Cove’. Only two remain in place but it doesn’t take too much effort to imagine this as the location of commemorative or celebratory acts designed to honour the founding fathers who’d presided over what, looking back, must have now seemed like a veritable golden age. An earthwork was also constructed to hem-in the whole site and mark it out as somewhere ‘special’.
So, what we now think of as ‘Avebury’ had finally started to take shape – thanks, not least, to eye-watering, hernia-inducing amounts of grunt and enormous ingenuity that enabled the stones to be hauled or slid in from the natural sarsen ‘drifts’ which abound (or, at least, abounded) in this part of what’s now Wiltshire. And then, five hundred years later, another ‘crisis’ came careering down the tracks…
Surprisingly, perhaps – given the origins of the Neolithic British – Neolithic Britain seems to have evolved into a pretty insular place that had very little contact with mainland Europe. Maybe they’d held a referendum. (Only joking!) Around 2500 BC, however, these limited horizons received quite a jolt when the next ‘new wave’ of people started arriving from the Continent.
These were the so-called Beaker people of the Copper and Early Bronze Age. Full disclosure: I’ve never been all that wild about their name. For me, it conjures up visions of those non-spill cups that toddlers drink out of. In fact, the ‘Beaker’ bit is a not-terribly-good description of the shape of the posh pottery that these folk were in the habit of interring as grave goods. Even more important, though, was the game-changing ability to work metals – specifically (in the first instance) copper and gold. And perhaps even more important than THAT is the fact that, to quote Professor Alice Roberts from her excellent book ‘Ancestors’, “the genetic background of Britain is predominantly that of the Bronze Age”. Within a few hundred years, the Neolithic people had faded away and fallen by the wayside. But as for those Bronze Agers… Basically, they were us, but back then.
So how did the Neolithic people of Avebury respond to this gradually overwhelming influx? By building stuff, of course! Indeed, they expressed and asserted themselves by developing their landscape in even more remarkable ways than before. The ‘classic’ henge – in other words, the bank with its internal ditch – became a veritable monster, much higher, deeper and steeper than we see today. The huge main circle of standing stones, comprising around a hundred sarsens, was erected. Two great avenues of stones were also tacked on, one leading southwest, the other weaving its way southeast towards West Kennet and the now-vanished stone-and-timber-circle combo known today as ‘the Sanctuary’, up by the A4 where the speed-limit-busting traffic whistles past (and makes it extremely un-sanctuary-like).
Sensational, superlative Silbury Hill
Plus there’s arguably the single most impressive, most iconic feature in the entire Avebury landscape: the jaw-dropping, mind-boggling, reason-defying hugeness of Silbury Hill. Apparently (and I’ve not measured it personally) you could fit Stonehenge on top of this 40-metre artificial monster of a mound, which was built up, chalk layer by chalk layer, over many years or probably many decades. And while it may look like the ultimate burial mound, one thing it certainly wasn’t was a burial mound. No human remains have ever been discovered there. What on earth was it, then? Prestige monument? Territorial marker? Super-special ceremonial site? Ethereal meeting-place? Symbolic gateway to the heavens? Well, maybe all of these. Or none of them. Whatever the case, it’s certainly still got the ‘wow’ factor and surely must have blown quite a few ancient minds too.
Now you may say I’m a dreamer, but is it really going too far to speculate that Silbury Hill might – just, perhaps, possibly – have been the product of some degree of extraordinary co-operation between Neolithic and Beaker people? Down the road near Stonehenge, at the iconic Neolithic site of Durrington Walls, it’s been shown that copper tools were used to dig the holes of a big timber circle. Perhaps a sign of collaboration, then, rather than mutual disinterest or, indeed, distrust and possible conflict? And might, might, might something similar have happened at Silbury, on some level?
The Beaker folk were clearly comfortable interacting with, and putting their imprint on, the landscape they came upon around Avebury. Just look at all the round barrows littered about, burial places built over the course of many centuries. The burial of a Beaker teenager has even been discovered up at the Sanctuary. And we know the Bronze Age people assumed many of the cultural habits of their Neolithic predecessors, including henge-building. Maybe, then, with Silbury Hill, they embraced their new surroundings to the point of playing some sort of role in the gargantuan effort to create it.
Can’t prove it. But it’s a nice thought. And thinking is definitely something that Avebury invites you to do whenever you pay it a visit. For me, this whole location is definitely ‘liminal’ – not necessarily in terms of being a place where different realities or dimensions elide, but certainly in a psychological sense. I mean, come on! How can you stroll through such an archetypally timeless landscape and not find yourself reflecting on things – past, present and, indeed, future – in fresh, unfamiliar and really rather inspiring ways? See you on our next walk!
Need a new read?
Historian-archaeologist Professor Jasper Heathcoat-Beech has written five wide-ranging, accessible history books which contain far too many of his ‘jokes’. They include ‘Thirty Annoying Things in History’ and ‘Dig, Dig…Bang!’, a ghosted autobiography for his longtime friend and colleague Dr Doug Pitt. Available from Amazon and other major waterways. X/Twitter: @JasperBeech
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