OW AVE

The Avery Henge Monument is one of several stone circles in Wiltshire, England. It was built around 5,000 years ago and is the largest stone circle in Britain. The monument consists of three concentric stone circles with an earthwork bank and ditch surrounding them. There are also two avenues leading to nearby monuments. The purpose and meaning of Avery are still largely unknown, but it is believed to have held esoteric knowledge and played a significant role in ancient communities. The construction of Avery was a massive communal endeavor that took hundreds of years and involved thousands of people. The stones themselves were carefully chosen and may have represented the spirits of ancestors. Avery was both a reverential place for the remembered dead and a dramatic space that created a sense of awe and curiosity for visitors. Hello, today I'm going to talk about the ancient stone circles at Avery and Wiltshire, also known as the Avery Henge Monument. It's one of several stone monuments here, all within sight of each other, including West Kennet, Long Barrow, the Sanctuary and Wynmill and Silbury Hill. If you were to visit Avery today, you'd first notice its size. It's bigger than the other monuments and it sits at the heart of them. In fact, it's the biggest stone circle in Britain and each of its stones is bigger and in some cases even far bigger than any one of us. It was built around 5,000 years ago in a chalk land valley. This would once have been covered in a forest, but Neolithic man had begun clearing trees by this time to create grasslands for grazing animals and growing crops. This freed him from the urgent needs of survival and gave him more time to think about his place and his purpose in the world. Time even to reflect on the all-important questions of life and death. To build Avery was a remarkable feat. It would be even now, with the largest stones weighing in at over a hundred tons. It is estimated that thousands of men and women would have been involved over a construction that spanned nearly 600 years. This would have dominated the lives of generation after generation, occupying incalculable hours of time and effort. So you can well imagine just how important it must have been to these people and their ancient societies. As of any topic, there are many routes I could explore from here. Why build it where they did? What made these stones so special? How did they move them? All these things have been studied in some detail. But what I am mainly interested in here for this podcast is the esoteric, the very knowledge that people imparted on the stones and just what it was that Neolithic man might have experienced at this sacred place. I can start by saying that there is much more that we do not know about Avery than we in fact do. In prehistory, there are seldom clear answers to any question. Much of the monument was destroyed in the late Middle Ages, when the stones were unfortunately deemed by Christians to be the work of the devil, harbouring dangerous spirits. And after this onslaught, as you might imagine, only a mere fraction survived. As a result, just a minuscule 6% of the site has been excavated. The detail that we do have is largely drawn from the work of 17th century antiquarian William Stuckey. He was fascinated at the site and spent much of his life observing and cataloguing the stones at a time when they were more complete than they are today. So let's begin with what the monument looked like. I can paint a broad picture and then we can visualise it. There are three concentric stone circles, the biggest outer circle of roughly 100 sarsen stones, each set 11 metres apart. Then there are two inner circles, each comprised of even bigger stones. And at the very centre is the least understood, but in some ways the most intriguing stone configuration. Three enormous stones formed like a shelter known as the cove, and a large stone nearby called the obelisk. All around the outside, encircling everything, is an earthwork bank and ditch with a perimeter of about 420 metres. Within this bank are cut four entrances at regular intervals. Two avenues, known as Kennet and Beckhampton, lead out from these and extend at least two and a half kilometres towards nearby monuments. These were once lined with pairs of standing stones, probably constructed to help guide processions from one place to another. These avenues themselves, which are now carved in an open grassland, were once ancient pathways which were necessary to navigate through the forest from the time before the trees were cut down. So these routes are thought to have held long-standing symbolic significance within ancient communities, and the avenues serve now, even today, to preserve their memory within the landscape. Now that we have some concept of its structure, let's consider what an ancient visitor might have experienced here, because this is what gives Avery its mystery and power, even now, but certainly back then. Just the scale of the stones and walking through its huge, dramatic and splendid monument could have played a big part, especially in the ancient times when it would have appeared truly extraordinary. What would ancient man have felt here? Awe, fear, trepidation perhaps, but also, almost certainly, a sense of belonging to something much bigger. This would have been the stuff of real legend, stories and recollections to be shared around the fire pit and then passed down through time, shaping thoughts, ideas and beliefs. It was this esoteric knowledge that was the likely force behind Avery's potency, with deeply held beliefs and meanings binding communities together. Or perhaps, for those uninitiated newcomers and strangers like us, it might have been a mysterious or even a frightening force. Whatever the emotion, it was surely a powerful one. Let's focus now on the construction of Avery, the experience of being involved. Just the building process itself, over such a long time, will have been hugely significant in this society. Everything will have been difficult to do. From the breaking of the ground for the ditch, which was evidently done using deer antlers, moving the sarsen stones, shaping the sockets, hauling the stones upright, it all must have been a huge communal endeavour, enlisting thousands of people at work in the landscape over hundreds of years. The hillside will have been teeming with activity. My God, what a spectacle, what excitement, what collective purpose there must have been. Not just men hauling stones, but everybody, in fact including women and children, will all have made their contributions through basket making, lighting fires, cooking, carrying chalk and timber, making rope. It likely also included recruitment drives, powerful speeches needed to keep the workforce motivated and to make them stick around through the months and the years. Throughout all this, Neolithic communities will have forged important relationships with each other, with particular stones and with the monument itself as it emerged on the plain. And now let's move on to the stones themselves, because they were chosen carefully. Many early civilisations believed that stones contained the spirits of their ancestors, or they gave them specific meanings or powers, and there are several ethnographic parallels for such ancestor worship and stone animism. For instance, in Melanesian populations, where stones believed to enclose spirits were given names, full lives and even personalities. In Avery's case, the stones were specifically selected from nearby areas and then moved on sledges and rollers into their new positions within an imagined condensed world. This relocation of stones has been described as a gathering or a nurturing together of beloved, perhaps recently dead members of the community whose spirits lived within the stones. In short, the monument may be regarded as having been made not for the ancestors, but of them. Some of Avery's stones were most likely recognisable landmarks. Others bore traces of earlier human interactions with axe head sharpening or polishing, and yet more for their distinctive colours or shapes. Some had fossils running through them that resembled roots and bones. These stones were all intentionally picked, and they were determinedly singular. I like to think that they reflected the personalities of their resident ancestors. Avery's principal intention, rather than catering to the living, was to comfort these ancestors that it embodied. It was a reverential place, a world in which the remembered dead could reside in peace. The undulations of the surrounding chalk downlands and riverbeds could provide a sense of calm, of familiarity and permanence. And the monument itself tried to emulate these features, possibly in an attempt to allay any disturbance to the ancestors from the stone's relocation. Avery notably lacks animal bone and pottery fragments. This suggests that sanctity was preserved within the monument itself. Archaeological material is only found at Kennet Hill, nearby, where thousands of animal bones and pottery shards have been unearthed, and so perhaps this was where the feasting, and indeed the living, took place. But if Avery was primarily intended as an ancestral home, it is clear that it was also created with a sense of drama in mind. Whilst walking through the Henge, from any one vantage point around the perimeter, a large part of the monument is obscured, so much so that it can even be difficult to distinguish what is monument and what is landscape. The ridges of the downland follow the profile of the bank so closely. The rings and avenues serve to direct procession through the space in very particular ways, and they did this by restricting pathways and sightlines. At Kennet Avenue, for example, which is a well-trodden path that you encounter before reaching the monument, this is where the optical tricks began. The avenue first gives the impression that it might deliver you to another monument instead, and then, unexpectedly, it changes course and leads back towards Avery. The paired stones along this path also increase in height as you move along them, in line with the rising of the landscape, and this is a kind of visual game. It creates a sense of impending urgency. You can't actually see into the monument until you are nearly through the entrance. This has the effect of heightening your curiosity about what mysterious or maybe frightening thing might lie ahead. Even once you are inside the monument, the views are no less curated and restricted. Only the inner circle finally provides extensive views, revealing the impression of Avery's circularity and its centrality, and it grants clear vision of both Windmill Hill and Silbury Hill. It may have been designed also to enhance the sensory experience of the rituals and the ceremonies within. The embankment could have established a sound shadow, isolating the calm interior from the activity of its surroundings, creating a sense of spiritual immersion. Different areas of the monument may have been associated with particular rituals, some spaces intended to be more spiritually intense than others. For example, the cove is structured in such a way that it focuses sound. Thus, drumming and singing could reverberate and echo through the interior, whilst only muffled partial noises penetrated into the spaces beyond. We can all reimagine this effect today, but was it this that bound Neolithic communities together? Was this the true purpose of Avery? Almost certainly not. The inner sanctum may in fact have only been for the most important and sacred members of the community, entrance for everyone else either restricted or perhaps only allowed during certain rare ritual events. If the inner monument was reserved for just a sacred few, surely the lives of all were made richer by the monument's presence, both within and around the stones, tethering the monument to its makers and its makers to the monument. So finally, and here's my take-home message, Avery is a monument of many parts, most of which we don't understand. It has had a long and complex life over thousands of years. Man has variously given it spiritual and material significance, or discarded it, according to the shifting beliefs and needs of successive civilizations. Most people visiting today are unlikely to grasp the full power that the stones once held. Neolithic and then later civilizations probably built lifelong relationships with the stones and with the monument itself, and in ways that are similar to Madagascan examples of ancestral worship. They may even have entreated these stones and their ancestors to provide blessings or protections before important community ceremonies. Today we might relive the stones only by projecting our own cultural and world views, or engage with its physical presence as a sculptural or architectural work. This is such a very different perspective in so many fundamental ways. But we can also look at Avery as a monument of perpetual evolution. Its origins, after all, were spiritual and organic, an eternal thing without completion in mind. In its current form, it is far removed from the original, yet each successive encounter brings new interpretation to the place. If we think of it in this way, then it lives on, and we can keep alive that same sense of mystery and possibility that it always held.