AVEBURY, JUST HOW OLD IS ANCIENT?

At the time of the settlement period, Saxons from the tribes that came to identify themselves with Wessex seemingly avoided places like Avebury, and it is interesting to speculate why.

First the evidence! Virtually nothing to link Avebury with the Anglo-Saxons has been found except a grubenhaus, the sunken-floored hut characteristic of Saxon dwellings close to, but outside of, the west arm of the encircling ditch. One archeologist, Harry Aubury Burl, suggests the settlers referred to Avebury as the weala-dic, the moat or dyke of the wealas, or Welsh; but this practical description does not imply that it was anything other than a temporary place of refuge, rather like the numerous, already abandoned hillforts on the nearby downland. Stukeley, the famed antiquarian, certainly believed Avebury was Celtic, as he asserted in ‘Abury (sic) – A Temple of the British Druids’. A Victorian writer (Fergusson) suggests the stones were erected to commemorate the final battle of King Arthur.

Of course, Avebury predates the ‘wealas’ and was built in the neolithic era around 2600BC; therefore, its usage and (huge) significance was already lost in the mists of time. To the solitary Saxon cottager, or anhaga, that dared to live by this monumental site, it was therefore older by a factor of two than his era is to us.

But what could this settler have seen? It is unlikely it looked as the above illustration (an engraving by the romantic artist John Martin) as the ground would have been overgrown with tall trees, such as ash, so the full extent of site was hidden from view. Nevertheless, he knew that under the branches lurked the large and mysterious standing stones for any unwary huntsman or swineherd to encounter. The complete circles of stones would still been in situ, not for another thousand years would their toppling and destruction begin with puritanical zeal.

Yet more imposing was the ditch and rampart, not least as it would halted the progress of any traveller through the aescholt. Excavation during the nineteenth century showed the ditch to have a depth of over 30 feet, with a corresponding height of 20 to 25 feet for the rampart. Although this 50 foot differential has diminished over millenia, so today it quite a modest earth feature, in Saxon times it would have retained much if not all of its grandeur.

To the newcomer from across the ‘gannets bath’, as the Anglo-Saxons called the North Sea, Avebury must have been as baffling and awe-inspiring as it is today, and presumably suspicious of ‘old magicks’, while the nearby Vale of Pewsey and valley of the Kennet was settled in the 5th and 6th centuries, it seems most Saxon cotsetlan shunned such ancient and mystifying locations.