Avebury, Wiltshire

More uses for face masks

One of my favourite passages in Andrew Ziminski’s excellent book The Stone Mason: A History of Building Britain, is quite near the beginning, where the author describes his attempts at working sarsens, the materials used for the enormous prehistoric stone circle at Avebury and also for the nearby Dissenters’ Chapel. The chapel was originally built in 1670 using in part bits of sarsen obtained by chopping up chunks of some of Avebury’s standing stones. The point is that sarsen is very hard stone (up there with granite) and Ziminski wanted to try working it using the kind of tools available to Avebury’s prehistoric craftsmen. In other words he’d be working stone with stone – rounded lumps of sarsen or flint, which he’d use to pound away at the surface of the stone to cut into it or to smooth its surface.

Using stone tools like this, Avebury’s builders (working at some time between 2850–2220 BC) managed to prepare and position around 100 stones, as well as building a large circular bank and ditch – the resulting henge is so large that the modern village of Avebury sits inside it. And this stone circle is only part of the picture. It sits in a whole landscape of ancient sites – barrows, the causwayed enclosure of Windmill Hill, the stone circle at the Sanctuary, the vast mound of Silbury Hill – stretching for miles around. The integration of stones and landscape also makes Avebury a wonderfully atmospheric place – it is my favourite English prehistoric site. 

Ziminkski discovered that walloping away at a large lump of sarsen with stone tools like those used in the Neolithic soon raises a huge amount of white dust; since sarsen is made essentially of silica, this dust can be dangerous to human lungs. Anyone doing this Neolithic job in the 21st century needs a face mask. Even so, it took a whole day of pounding to produce about a square foot of approximately smooth stone. This might lead us to conclude that in Stone Age Avebury there was a lot of labour available, and there might well have been. But Ziminski makes another point. Like other kinds of stone, sarsen gets extra hard when it has been exposed to the elements for a long time. If you quarry stone that has been beneath the earth’s surface it contains much more moisture, or ‘quarry sap’ as stone workers call it. Stone containing all its quarry sap is softer and easier to work and it was probably knowledge of this secret that made monuments like Avebury and Stonehenge possible. And also buildings like the Dissenters’ Chapel, which Ziminski had come to Avebury to repair. For that job, the stone mason could use his modern steel hammer, punch, and claw tool.

Great Rollright, Oxfordshire

Only connect

A few weeks ago the Resident Wise Woman and I decided to grab an hour or two out and go over to the Rollright Stones, a prehistoric* stone circle that we’ve visited a few times before. I don’t know what it is about this place. Some say it feels spooky, others that it recharges their energies. I find it atmospheric – but very hard to photograph. My pictures of it seem to show expanses of grass with some tiny stones in the distance, or close-ups of stone that look like just…stone. My best effort was probably on a misty morning† when you couldn’t see the stones very well at all – at least there was atmosphere, even if it was mostly made of water vapour.

Once we’d had a walk round, imbibed the atmosphere on this much clearer day, and admired the way people had been decorating the hedge with coloured ribbons, we decided to walk around the neighbouring field to look at a smaller, associated group of stones, the Whispering Knights. They’re probably the remains of the inner chamber of a neolithic burial mound. The earth mound has long gone and the stones now form a tight cluster. Huddled together against a background of the gently undulating Oxfordshire countryside they make it easy to see why people imagined them as a group of conspiratorial figures speaking to each other sotto voce.

The Knights hold people’s attention just as magnetically as the stone circle. On approaching we saw that visitors have tossed coins that have gathered in a shallow depression in one of the lower stones; they have also left little twists of straw and a bunch of flowers. Offerings to the gods? To Mother Earth? Memorials to loved ones who loved this place? Or just encouragement to the people who look after the stones? Maybe all of the above. Evidence anyway of the ways in which people today still connect with this fascinating and haunting place.

Offerings to the Whispering Knights, Rollright
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*The stones have their own website, here, which gives approximate dates of 2500–2000 BC for the stone circle and 5000 BC for the Whispering Knights.

† My previous, misty encounter with the Rollright Stones is remembered here. The comments section to this earlier post includes accounts of various legends associated with the stones.

Great Rollright, Oxfordshire

All the king’s men

Going over to Oxfordshire the other morning for lunch with some friends, I decided to make a short diversion and visit the Rollright Stones. This stone circle on the Oxfordshire-Warwickshire borders is one of my favourite ancient sites and I’m not its only fan. The small site can get busy, but it was a cold, foggy day and I thought the stones would be deserted and atmospheric, and so they were.

The Rollright Stones are some 70-odd lumps of limestone arranged in a circle about 31 metres across. The stones are not very big (few of them are higher than about 1.2 metres) and, as they’re limestone, they’ve eroded into a wonderful range of shapes – the standard cliché in books and websites compares them to rotten teeth, which does them no favours at all. They’re hard to date, but I think archaeologists refer to them as late Neolithic or early Bronze Age – in other words around 2100 BC. Of course, no one knows exactly how they were used, but such circles were clearly religious sites.


The stones have their fair share of legends. The most famous story tells of a king and a group of knights who were marching across the countryside. They met a witch hereabouts, who told the king that he would be ruler of all England if, when he took seven strides, he could see the nearby village of Long Compton. The king strode forwards – but the village, which should have been easy to see, was shielded from his gaze by a hillock. Then the witch turned the king and his men to stones – the knights became the stone circle, while their leader became the so-called King Stone, a megalith that stands across the road from the main group. In another legend, the stones regularly leave their field to walk down to a local spring and take a drink, while another tale says that the stones are impossible to count.

Looking at the stones on a misty morning, a sharp wind blowing and the sun struggling to get through, it’s easy to believe how legends formed about this place. It’s easy too, to understand how people still see the circle as a sacred space. Those who had left sprigs of ivy and mistletoe and a holly wreath on top of some of the stones clearly felt the same way. There are some fine druids in West Oxfordshire, as my friends told me over lunch.

Avebury, Wiltshire

This is one of England’s most magical places. The vast stone circle, so big it encloses the entire village, and the archaeological landscape in which it sits, make up a complex whole that is rightly a World Heritage Site. Sometime between c. 3700 and 2200 BC, people in this part of Wiltshire constructed earthworks, arranged the large stone circle, erected other standing stones and stone alignments, and raised up long barrows to bury their dead.

Although the people who erected the stones lived millennia ago, there is a feeling of continuity too, whether in the happy combination of field walls and cottages made of the same hard sarsen as the standing stones, or in the fact that later houses, not to mention Christian places of worship, have been built within the vast stone circle. This combination of ancient stones and earthworks and a modern community living amongst it all is one of the things that makes Avebury special.

The exact dates, construction methods, and precise purpose of most of Avebury’s monuments is not known exactly, but the sheer size of the site makes its importance obvious. The careful alignment of the stones, the way in which they engage with the patterns of the movements of the sun and moon, point to a religious use. So does the atmosphere of the place. As one walks around the site, seemingly endless stones are revealed, and a combination of trees, deep ditches, and steep banks creates a play of shadows and light, of mystery and revelation.

Many have responded to the atmosphere of Avebury. The painter Paul Nash, for example. In his contribution to Herbert Read's Unit One anthology of 1934, he wrote: ‘Last summer I walked in a field near Avebury where two rough monoliths stand up, 16 feet high, miraculously patterned with black and orange lichen, remnants of an avenue of stones which led to the Great Circle. A mile away, a green pyramid casts a gigantic shadow. In the hedge, at hand, the white trumpet of a convolvulus turns from its spiral stem, following the sun. In my art I would solve such an equation.’ Stones, earth, lichen, and flowers: all followed the sun and do so still.