On Monday, after we had gazed upon Silbury Hill, we walked a mile further to the village of Avebury. It was good to arrive there on foot and not in a motor vehicle.
Almost five thousand years ago, our pagan ancestors began to construct something there - something that was quite amazing. It would have involved thousands of hours of manual labour and the project evolved over hundreds of years in different phases. This was in a time of hunting and gathering, before farming took a hold and changed the landscape forever.
It was a huge stone circle surrounded by ditches, a deep moat and tall embankments. There were also avenues of standing stones that led up to the stone circle. Beyond the shielding embankment were two smaller stone circles. This was not a place of burial but a place of pre-Christian ritual. We can only guess at what happened there for no one really knows. The mysteries will never be uncovered with any certainty.
Centuries later, as memories of the true purpose of the place faded away, an agricultural village grew up right next to the stone circle and some buildings were even constructed within the great circle. A minor road also bisected the sacred site. It seems that in the middle ages, people had little regard for our pre-Christian heritage. The established church had a vested interest in ignoring, belittling or destroying such sites because they suggested an older and more fundamental way of regarding human existence.
©English Heritage
I guess we should be grateful that the villagers of Avebury did not obliterate the ancient site entirely. Though less visited than Stonehenge, seventeen miles to the south, Avebury still attracts a lot of visitors. We modern folk wander around feeling puzzled, unable to comprehend what it is all about. What did they think? How did they speak? What mattered to them?
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/bnRwDXz
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