I go on a silly little trip to... Avebury
On narratives of place and questions without answers
Did all this happen, or didn’t it?
I don’t know, Matthew. I really don’t know.
Children of the Stones (1977)
I am staying in Avebury for the week with my mother, in an old red house on the edge of the southern stone circle. The house we are staying in is owned by exactly the sort of person you would think would own a house in a stone circle: three floors of bookshelves loaded with books on sacred geometry and the poetry of John Donne, a back garden full of fragmented sarsen stones, and a telescope in the attic window pointing up at the night sky.
We have spent the day tracing circles within circles, trying to select our favourite rocks - or at least, those that speak to us in some way. We find the stones strangely mute, though, despite my mum having brought along small beakers so we can listen to them as you would listen to the sea in a shell.
Eventually I choose a well-weathered individual shaped almost like a hexagon. My mum picks a lichen-clad, undulating option which she says “feels like a friend”. We also admire a sarsen only still barely standing because of the bolts pushed through it holding it together, which feels relatable to both of us with big milestone birthdays on the horizon - 40 for me, and for her, 70.
After our day spiralling through the stones we wind ourselves back down by watching Children of the Stones (1977), and realise we’re in the house next to the house where astrophysicist Adam Brake and his son Matthew were staying. The screen shows the window of the room where we sit, almost 50 years later; an echo through time. As we finish up and say goodnight, a dirty storm is beginning to blow outside; the wind is blustering down the chimney and the rain pattering at the window.
Now I am sneaking out into the night to see what the stones feel like in the darkness; if they are still mute or if they will speak after the sun has set. I get dressed as quietly as possible, my jumper and my coat rustling and rasping. I am sure my mum - currently in the room above my head - is entirely aware, in that way mothers often are, of everything I am doing.
The moment I close the garden gate behind me I regret my decision. The sky is suffused with an eerie, shifting orange light - workmen are resurfacing the road all week here, creating a constant high level hum that makes the air around the stones ring slightly. The rain is heavier than I thought, and attempts to dash my glasses off my face.
I enter the field opposite the house, navigating the over-complicated locking mechanism on the gate, and head towards two hulking shapes on the glowing orange horizon. These are the two remaining stones of three which together made up what was called ‘the Cove’, a structure at the centre of Avebury’s southern inner circle.
Avebury’s complex shape is such that ‘stone circle’ does not really do it justice - it is more properly two inner circles, surrounded by one huge circle “as big as the O2 arena”. This is how its size is described by a tour guide who we meet earlier in the day, looking dispirited outside the National Trust shop, where no one has turned up for his 1 o’clock. When I cheekily ask him for “one free fact”, he immediately infodumps at least fifty on us and then drags us half way across a field to show us his favourite polissoir - a stone which used to be used to polish and sharpen arrow heads before being repurposed as part of the circle. We wouldn’t have noticed it on our own, and my mum is particularly taken by stroking the smooth patch on this jagged rock.
Outside of but attached to the outer circle, two snaking ‘avenues’ of trailing stones head off South and West, linking Avebury up with other ceremonial neolithic sites. The Southern Avenue (known as the West Kennet Avenue) is still partially in place, while the Western Avenue is now almost without visible trace. The West Kennet Avenue weaves its way across Wiltshire’s chalk hills and then joins up with a smaller ‘circle within a circle’ known as The Sanctuary, now marked only by much-diminished, peggy little concrete placemakers. The original stones here seem to have encircled a timber hut, which became a slightly larger hut, which became a slightly larger hut.
“And if anybody tells you they know what any of it was there for, they’re having you on,” says our tour guide. “We haven’t got a clue.”
He also tells us that the largest remaining stone of the two making up The Cove - the one I am now making a torchless and footless beeline for in the dark - stretches a further 9 feet underground (“Oh, two mes!” I say - my schooling was post-imperial so my only frame of reference is ever that I know I am just over 5 feet). The soil around the base of the stone, he tells us, was tested as being 5000 years old, pushing the circle’s creation back much earlier than previously thought.
I cannot confirm whether this dating is correct: every pamphlet, every plaque, every lecture I have watched or read on Avebury seems to contradict the previous one. The narratives surrounding the site seem to have been so plastic since Alexander Keiller’s excavations in the 1920s that any sign you might read, any book you might pick up, may already be out of date.
We ask the tour guide about the hut at the Sanctuary. He says there was no hut at the Sanctuary. You can ask a lot of questions about Avebury but the answer you will get will depend on who you ask, when you ask them, and what time they answer from.
By the time I am halfway across the field, the rain is hitting me sideways. I can make out other shapes around me in the dark - the remains of the rest of the southern circle, and a line of stones within the circle which now point directly towards the Saxon church nearby - though of course the church is much newer, only a little over a thousand years old. Many churches were planted on top of stone circles at the same time as those circles were being purposefully buried and disassembled; presumably an attempt to cover over the unknown and steer would-be parishioners away from pagan temptations.
It is raining hard and I can no longer see through my glasses darkly, so I remove them and jam them into my pocket.
There is a clear tension, I think, in the response to these spaces. At the same time as the markers of these spaces of community, celebration or sublimity were being suppressed or covered over, these existing sites were often appropriated or incorporated into more modern uses or belief systems. I am reminded of the fact that yew trees in churchyards often pre-date the buildings; they were sites of worship, or at least of meaning, before the containers for that impulse were even constructed. The articulation of the space evolves over time, either naturally or by force, but the importance of Place remains throughout. What we repress or forget is transformed and becomes part of our new landscapes.
In nearby Alton Priors, two sarsen stones are stuck underneath the floorboards of the church, but can still be viewed by raising a trapdoor. Visitors place votive offerings through the hole, bringing scraps to prisoners that can no longer see the sky they were born under.
I have reached the largest of the stones, and am expecting to feel dwarfed or frightened by its presence - but the weather means my primary view of it is as shelter. The name of the ‘Cove’ in the centre of the circle is suddenly more understandable - this is refuge in the middle of the great dark and great unknown; something which tethers you in place within this vast landscape with its unpredictable moods and weathers.
Rebecca Solnit writes that “that thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location.” We might not know the story of why Avebury was assembled - but there may not be just one story. The monument was not built all at once but built in multiple steps, sometimes hundreds of years apart. There is nothing to say that what the place meant to the builders who propped together the Cove was the same as what it meant to those that created the inner circles, or those who created the outer circles, or those who sketched the avenues that led outwards and away across the chalk.
What we can know is there was something once here - or something believed to be here - which was marked with a circle, which became a slightly larger circle, which became a slightly larger circle. We keep asking questions about it, but all we end up doing is spiralling.
I tuck myself into the shadow of the cove stone, out of the wind, and lay a hand on its huge and silent flank.
Silly Little Bits
Things I’ve been reading & watching & listening to
Sometimes I pick up a book and I recognise myself so immediately and so distinctly that I think: well what on earth is wrong with THIS person? Maybe if I can find out what is wrong with them, I can find out what is wrong with me! If they are further down the path in working this out then I am, then perhaps they have found the answer!
So far no one has found the answer, but recently I have been reading Lavinia Greenlaw - who is new to me - and have felt both that shock of recognition, and also the certainty that this is someone who is further down the same path. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I do not think this path has an end or a destination, and probably the work of following it is the work of life.
Reading: Mary Gaitskill - Lost Cat, Jacquelin Harpman - I Who Have Never Known Men, Samantha Harvey - Orbital
Watching: The very funny and knowledgeable Gabby Hutchinson Crouch recommended the documentary Three Salons at the Seaside to me, and it really is a wonderful slice-of-life look at nineties Blackpool - the sort of thing the BBC used to do so well, and now sadly doesn’t do much at all. I wondered why everything in it felt both so ‘in the past’ and so familiar to me, then realised that of course I grew up in North England in the nineties: this is my familiar past.
Listening to: Robyn - Sexistential, meg elsier - spittake, Maria BC - Marathon, Dagmar Zuniga - in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music
Eating/cooking: Wild garlic & borlotti beans in beef broth - any old veg kicking around in the bottom of the fridge - a dash of soy sauce, sesame seeds, sesame oil. You need to choose a robust bean for this that will keep its own shape as you want them to perch in the broth rather than turn into mush. There is a time and a place for mush, but it isn’t Spring! I admire the borlotti, a bean that knows itself well and can hold its own.
There’s a noise that I make when I read something which is beautiful and resonates with me, between a grunt and a sigh (a grigh?). Anyway, I made that noise when I read the last line of this. Also I went and bought Some Answers Without Questions straight away.
“A bean that knows itself well.” 👍🏻