Saturday 8 April was a glorious sunny day for this archaeological, Neolithic walk along both stone avenues starting at the Sanctuary and terminating at Beckhampton. The assembly point was the Sanctuary (SU 1185 6805) where William Stukeley witnessed concentric stone circles being destroyed in 1723.
He wrote: " . . . farmer Green took most of the stones away to his buildings at Bekamton; and in the year 1724 farmer Griffin plough'd half of it up . . . In the winter of that year the rest were all carry'd off, and the ground plough'd over. The loss of this work I did not lament alone; but all the neighbours (except the person that gain'd the little dirty profit) were heartily griev'd for it. It had a beauty that touch'd them far beyond those much greater circles in Abury town. . . . But those of the Sanctuary they still talk of with great pleasure and regret."
Where are the stones now? From Stukeley's sketches they seem to rise only 4 or 5 feet above the turf line which suggests they weighed but 4 to 5 tons. Did farmer Green use them as foundation stones or flags in farm buildings? Pete and Terry are searching. They doubt that the stones were broken up and some may be visible somewhere..
Mike Pitts' excavation of 1999 was discussed, especially its indication that rings of timber posts (not a wooden building) preceded the rings of standing stones. The Sanctuary's situation in the landscape was described, and the sites of neighbouring monuments pointed out (the long barrows of East and West Kennet, Silbury Hill, the two stone circles a couple of hundred metres to the north along the Ridgeway, and the out-of-sight Golden Ball Hill and Knap Hill).
Then at about 11.30 the gathering of some 12 megalithic/Neolithic enthusiasts set off along the Kennet Avenue, over stiles and through meadows to the 5 megaliths by the A4 highway which are marked on archaeological maps. Besides these, other megaliths in the vicinity close to the line of the Avenue were pointed out and inspected. They included a megalith north of West Kennet House which we know by an old photograph to have stood inside the garden of the house on the line of the Avenue some 70 years earlier. North-east of farm buildings a little to the north are two fine megaliths lying prone, one with a hole through it which we cleared of soil and nettle-roots (we may put a photograph of this on line at www.stonehenge-avebury.net in a week or two). In the summer when the grass is long these and some of the other fallen megaliths in the region become difficult to find. Keeping to the Avenue as closely as possible we crossed the road and stopped at the position of the invisible Stone 38b (SU 1080 6908). This stone is known to lie beneath the turf, its presence having been detected by ultrasonic means by Dr Colin Shell and his Ph.D. student. A 3-D representation of this stone has been built up using the latest computer methods as Dr Shell showed at a recent WANHS meeting in Devizes.
Crossing the stile we entered the long field which contains the section of the Avenue
restored by Alexander Keiller, stretching from Stones 37a and 37b to Stone 4b close to the south side of Avebury Henge. It was reassuring to see that the paint which had been on Stones 37a and 37b since the vandalism perpetrated last June had been satisfactorily removed. Farther along we stopped at length at Stone 26a to study its east-facing surface which has been extensively worked over by the hand of prehistoric sculptors to produce a refined north-facing head in right profile. Everybody was deeply interested by this and in the axe-grinding marks present on the east side of Stone 19b towards its base. The character of these marks is such as to indicate that the stone was recumbent in the epoch when it was used for axe-sharpening.
Passing Stone 4b we entered the henge and stone circles of Avebury by the southern gateway between Stones 98 and 1 to arrive at the site of the great Obelisk which centred the South Circle. The hypothesis about the calendrical and inferred fertility links between the circumferential 'female' Stones 106 and 105 and the phallic Obelisk was outlined. On this occasion the megaliths of the North Circle and the Great Circle were not visited, this having been done in detail on an earlier outing (August 1999). It was then time to take a late lunch at the Red Lion, 2.30-3.30 p.m.
After leaving the henge via the western causewayed entrance we followed the route of missing megaliths along the High Street pointing out the places where William Stukeley had reported megaliths of the Beckhampton Avenue in the 1720s. We crossed the river which is very broad and water-filled at this time of year and reached Bray Street where many megaliths - arguably once part of the Beckhampton Avenue - now lie exposed because of recently removed undergrowth (SU 0935 6987). Farther along, in a hedge by the lane that runs along the north side of Longstones Field we inspected Stone XI, a fine megalith of the Outer Avebury Circuit, as described in The Secrets of the Avebury Stones.
Upon reaching the surviving two stones (A, E) of Beckhampton Cove (0890 6930) a drawing made by Stukeley which shows five stones (A, B, C, D, E) was studied so that the positions of the missing ones were clarified. The excavations of a Neolithic earthwork enclosure and of part of the Avenue in 1999 by staff from Leicester, Newport and Southampton Universities were then summarised, and photographs of the three reburied megaliths (the 'F Stones') shown.
The final monument of the day was the enormous Beckhampton long barrow (0870 6910). Did the Beckhampton Avenue go to its east or west? Stukeley thought east, and he is probably correct (as with much of his tested fieldwork). The megalith by the road at SU 0861 6878 may be part of it (except for having been shifted due to road widening in the 1960s from the other side of the road where Crawford saw it in the 1920s). In an old hedge fronting a garden west of the long barrow Mark White spotted a megalith which we have added to our map of existing known stones.
Thus ended a great day at 6.15 p.m. The next meeting of the megalith group will be on 29 April, in the environs of Stonehenge (Cursus, Avenue, visits to all species of round and earthen long barrows), Normanton Down, and Robin Hood Ball Neolithic causewayed enclosure (please refer to www.stonehenge-avebury.net for details). After that, within the interior of Stonehenge 6.30 to 7.30 p.m. we meet on on Sunday 7 May (cost £8 each for 26 people).