Stone Circles, The Unlucky Barber and the Oldest Cemetery We Ever Saw

We knew when we were getting close to Avebury when we spied one of Wiltshire’s famed Chalk Horses from the road.

Cherhill White Horse, from the road

Britain’s Chalk Horses are commonly regarded as Neolithic eco-art, oddly expansive expressions of pagan worship left behind by fur-becaped nomadic herders with plenty of time on their hands. There are a substantial number of prehistoric ground-cut monuments in Britain, true enough, but of all the horse figures, only one of them – the Uffington White Horse, in Oxfordshire – dates to Neolithic times. 

This one, the Cherhill White Horse, was cut by a reportedly semi-crazy doctor in 1780 who bellowed instructions to his workers through a megaphone. Like many of the others horse carvings, it has been vandalized and “scoured” many times over the years; it is now in the care of the National Trust and the local county council.

We pulled into the immense car park on the outskirts of Avebury and tried to get our bearings. The town is basically encircled by the henge, which consists of a large outer ring of stones, and two smaller rings within, one of which sits primarily on private property.

A sign pointed us to the walk around the large ring, and along the way we passed a huge field hosting a murder of crows worm-diving or something. You could tell it had rained recently.

The great stone circle awaited, but we made our way over to the church first.

St James, Avebury

St James was probably the oldest church we saw in the country (you can make the case that Westminster Abbey, parts of which date to the 9^th century, is older, but Westminster isn't really a functioning church, and the building itself is a dizzying patchwork of construction extending over many centuries). 

St James was a somber place, much of the building fabric dating to Saxon times, 

and the interior of the church bore a deeply melancholy air, despite the glow of late morning sun streaming in from the east.  

The Font dates to the 9^th century, although it was probably carved in the mid-12^th century.

9th century font - St James, Avebury

And of course, the churchyard…

It was off to see the stone circle. 

       

There was a time years ago when ancient and sacred places would have triggered a hush of New Agey reverence from me, seduced as I may have been by the fanciful speculations of von Däniken and Castaneda and others, and Avebury is as likely a place as any in England to quench those yearnings for primitive wisdom or paranormalia. Leylines, crop circles, ancient henges - Britain teems with these things, and here we were, right in middle of one of the most beguiling.  

But…eh, not really. 

The large stone circle is an impressive and quizzical thing, and yes, you do kind of want to imagine tribal ceremonies and primitive chanting in long-lost languages and the embers of a great late-night bonfire drifting skyward over the verdant Salisbury Plain. But you kind of have to make yourself do it. 

And again, you really have to understand what you're looking at; the reality of the place is a little more complicated than “caveman’s rocks still standing.” 

The stones were a nuisance to the growing agriculture-dependent population of medieval times, but more importantly some local clergy got it in their mind that the stones were actually raised by the Devil himself (which, actually, would probably have made sense to a local population of deeply pious and hopelessly superstitious farmers, especially as no one could tell exactly how the stones got there or how they got stood up - 'c'mon, folks, regular people couldn't have done this...'). It didn't take much to impress upon their parishioners the need to rid their fields of this clearly-satanic handiwork, which was sort of a pain in the neck for them anyway. The clergy's preferred method, not that they had many options, was toppling the multi-ton stones deep into adjacent, pre-dug pits and burying them. Well, more precisely, getting some Hell-fearing local yob to do it. Presumably the clergy supervised. 

Purging the work of The Devil has its perils, of course. Evidently a man in the 14^th century was crushed when a stone he was trying to topple actually fell on top of him, compressing him in the waiting pit. Unable to move the stone to retrieve the man (where's the Devil when you really need him?), they just left him there and covered him up. His remains were excavated in the 1930’s by some archaeologists; they think he was a traveling barber of the early 14th century, judging by the scissors in his trousers and a handful of coins from about 1320. The stone that crushed him has ever since been referred to as the Barber Stone - his remains are now in the Natural History Museum in London. 

Sharon in front of The Barber Stone. The Barber is in London now. 

Fearing that the man’s death was an act of satanic retribution for scarring the site, a not-unreasonable judgment, the locals abandoned further efforts to topple the stones. The Black Death ensued not long after, and what remained of the population lost interest in purging the site of pagan or demonic iconography, although the destruction of the stones resumed a couple hundred years later and lasted into the early 1700's. The method by then was to heat the stones with great fires, then pour cold water over them and sledgehammer at the cracks that developed. All again, unsurprisingly, at the behest of the local Devil-vigilant clergy. 

  

Avebury’s importance as an archaeological site was first recognized in the early eighteenth century, and the site was saved from further destruction through the efforts of a couple of wealthy landowners who bought up farmland around the remaining stone circles. But the majority of the excavations, study and restoration of the site is credited to the Scottish born Alexander Keiller, a marmalade heir who did much of his work tracing the circles and re-standing the stones during  the 1930’s. A museum there is named after him.

Massive stones remain buried at the site, some of which have been found as recently as the last decade.

So what you’re looking at, when you walk around the stones, is a circle that has been reconstructed, with monolithic members re-erected in the early part of the twentieth century. In some places, markers have been placed to indicate where now-lost stones stood. It is a Neolithic survival, with a couple of qualifying asterisks and plenty of  unanswered questions. Still, for my money and time, a far more interesting place than Stonehenge.

We strolled around the path through and around town, climbed a little hill and came upon a section of the great circle sitting on private property. And Sharon met some friends.

Wiltshire Horn, taunting Sharon's t-shirt with defiant indifference

These are not actually goats, they’re Wiltshire Horn, specially bred and indigenous to Wiltshire only.

Last stop…we climbed back into the VW and headed southeast toward West Kennet Long Barrow. The site sits atop a long, sloping hill, and you’d drive right past it if you didn't know where to look. We parked behind a bus, barely off the road. The climb up was gentle enough but a mile in length and especially after two hours of walking around Avebury, it was a little exhausting. 

At the top is an underground burial site, one of the oldest in Europe. 

West Kennet Long Barrow

Dating to about 3600 BC, four hundred years before Stonehenge, the mound is enclosed by huge rocks and within lay (until about middle of the nineteenth century) the remains of a few dozen Neolithic individuals. (We don’t know what happened to them after they were dug up by the Victorians.) 

When we reached the top, the site was occupied by what appeared to be a dozen basically bored fifth graders, each haven taken a turn crawling around inside the rock-lined cave. We waited until the last of them had exited; there isn't much to see, a few niches here and there that contained skeletons at one time. It's humid, unnaturally still and more than a little creepy inside. Definitely not for the claustrophobic. 

The entirety of site itself is not yet fully excavated; it is unclear if the barrow extends further, but as the archaeologists believe the site was in use for 1000 years, there are likely more goodies to be found up there.

The site also affords a very nice view of Silbury Hill, right across the road. 

No one really knows exactly what this immense Neolithic mound was used for, but they think it was started around 2400BC. Like Stonehenge, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site - you're not allowed to climb it. Which was perfectly okay with us as, by this time, we were both well spent and wouldn't have anyway.

We walked down from the barrow, having hit the oldest known cemetery in the UK, squeezed into the VW, and took off for London.