Avebury
In Wiltshire, almost one hundred miles west of London and slightly north of the legendary stone circle of Stonehenge stands Avebury, the largest known stone circle or sanctuary complex in the world. Avebury is older than its acclaimed sister site, Stonehenge, and many visitors and pilgrims find it more compelling than its companion site. The ancient stone circles of Avebury are shrouded in mystery, and they exercise a fascination which is all their own. I have written elsewhere of the ancient brooding melancholy aspect of Avebury; one cannot help but be transfixed by this contact with the monumental works of Neolithic man and the scale of his achievements.
The magnificent complex consists of three stone circles nestled within a grassy chalk bank about 1500 feet in diameter, rising here and there to a height of twenty feet. A ditch or trench surrounds the bank and has entrances at the four equidistant points on the compass. Within lie three stone circles of giant sarsen stones which cover almost thirty acres. Originally there were a hundred sarsen stones in the outermost stone circle alone, but of these only twenty-seven stones remain today.
On approaching Avebury along the ancient Ridgeway, one is immediately struck by its size, its scale and its obvious age. The place is truly ancient. The massive irregular sarsen stones of which the sanctuary is formed are between nine and twenty feet high and some of them weigh close to fifty tons. Each stone was hand hewn by Neolithic peasants a short distance away using primitive tools, then transported the distance of a few kilometers to Avebury where it was erected and firmly sited.
Even the ditch which surrounds Avebury's outer circle is a marvel. To create the ditch, an estimated 200,000 tons of rock and soil material was removed using the most primitive of tools such as antlers, flints and other stone implements, a grueling task which must have taken Neolithic man a long time to complete. Archeologists have discovered that the ditch was once filled with water, and to Neolithic man, the sanctuary must have appeared to float on a kind of island.
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