Avebury
  

click to return home
         
   
 

click to return to places
   

unicorn head resting on the bush
a photo from our handfasting at Avebury
Beltain 1993

    

 

  My earliest memories include visits to the stone circles, banks and ditches, barrows, hills, streams and village of Avebury      
         
  Most years in my ’teens I walked the Ridgeway track, an ancient path along the chalk ridge,
usually doing the 100 miles or so between Warminster in Wiltshire and Ivinghoe Beacon in
Buckinghmshire (not too far from where Molly and I now live), stopping at Avebury to sleep by the barrows near the Sanctuary ... For more on the Ridgeway, click here.		      
         
  Molly and I were handfasted (married) in a Druid ceremony at Avebury.    

 

   

The next best thing to visiting Avebury is visiting Pete Glastonbury’s website to see panoramic views of the circles and surroundings.
Here’s Pete’s site.

one of Pete's pictures
on the cover of a book I co-edited
with Jenny Blain and Doug Ezzy
  
   
 
   

Jenny Blain and Robert Wallis’ Sacred Sites Project has some good stuff:

here’s their Avebury photo gallery, but the articles and other documents are important too.

one of Jenny's photos from the Sacred Sites website
  
         
   
There is also an excellent chapter about Avebury in the book Bollocks to Alton Towers: Uncommonly British Days Out — although its comparison between the way that heritage and tourist managers "manage" and present the two sites may be soon seem too dramatic: the National Trust now appear determined to make life as difficult and depressing at Avebury as it can be at Stonehenge.

Click here to buy the book from Amazon
  
       
here’s some pictures to celebrate not only Avebury but also Molly and my Beltain 1993 handfasting      
         
 

these photos are in chronological order, beginning with a procession, the main event at the Cove, and going on to picnic afterwards

      

 
         
         
   

 

   
     
   

 

 
     
 
         
 

One handfasting wasn’t enough, so we did it again that summer at the Lady’s Well, Holystone, in Northumberland.

The Avebury one involved my family and our friends in the south of England, the Northumberland one involved Molly's family and our friends in the north of England.

Click here for photos of that event.

     
     
 

 

  On 7 April I visited Avebury at the invitation of Don and Linda Philips to meet with a delightful group of Unitarians. The event is also recorded in Syd Matthews’ Cirencester Unitarians site    
       
  * Note: the pub is not, as is sometimes claimed, the only pub in a stone circle ... Strangely, the same claim is sometimes made for the Druid's Arms at Stanton Drew. But they're both fine places to celebrate and rest and eat and drink and chat ...  
  lunch in the Red Lion pub * the group    
 
  the Cove lichens on one of the cove stones Silbury Hill
     
  Silbury Hill and the River Kennet River Kennet and Windmill Hill in the background    
       
         
  My most recent visit to Avebury was on 2 May at the invitation of In Vivo (a student organisation attached to the section of culture and personality psychology of the Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands) on 2 May 2006 (thanks very much!). We'd met at Stonehenge and talked there for a while.    
         
   
  At Avebury we had a cuppa in the pub to warm up (it was a damp and drizzly day) and then spent an hour among the stones. Afterwards, the student group left for Oxford and I set off to find somewhere to sleep before walking part of the Ridgeway for the next few days. But before they left, they gave me a litre of Academisch Bier ... pictured here at Wayland's Smithy the next day, after I'd shared it with the ancestors and the smith ... and we're all enormously grateful to Evelien and the group!! Now I'm eager to visit Nijmegen: a university that brews such good beer has to be worth a visit ...  
       

 

Last updated 15 May 2006