Avebury and the tragedy of the world’s biggest stone circle
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The most striking exhibit in the National Trust museum at Avebury is, sadly, a computer simulation.
It shows a virtual flypast of the world’s biggest stone circle… without the A361 trundling right through the centre. The Red Lion pub has been wiped away, as have red and white 30mph signs as you pass the inner ring of stones. Likewise, the public conveniences and disabled car park have been digitally removed. It’s as if a druid’s spell has come true.
For Avebury’s 6,000-year story has as much to tell us about destroying the past than celebrating it. The ultimate irony is that the barn housing the high-tech displays of the Avebury Museum was itself a piece of thoughtless vandalism.
The listed thatched barn was built 300 years ago where a segment of ramparts were demolished by a farmer simply looking for somewhere to do his threshing. These prehistoric structures he levelled off were immense white chalk walls, 55 feet high, a quarter of a mile radius and older than the pyramids.
The Avebury World Heritage area includes the world’s biggest stone circle, the largest prehistoric mound in Europe and Britain’s longest barrow. It should be an even greater attraction than Stonehenge just down the road, which it dwarfs in size by a factor of 14.
But while its smaller stone sister reels 850,000 around visitors a year, Avebury makes do with only 350,000. And Avebury’s guardians are worried about increasing that number.
The Visitor Services manager told me: “We don’t want to bring more people onto the site, we have to strike a difficult balance with visitors damaging what they’ve come to see.” He’s right to be cautious about generating more destruction. Both Avebury’s museums, the brand new museum one with its touchy-feely interaction and the old one alongside with its Neolithic relics in glass cases, tell the story of the tragedy of what could be one of our greatest tourist attractions.
From the medieval villagers who smashed up giant sarsen stones to build their houses to the seventeenth century Doctor Troope, who stole the bones from West Kennet Long Barrow to grind up and sell as a quack medicine, it shows how we’ve done our best to spoil the place through the ages.
Today’s visitor finds the A361 runs right through the centre of the inner circle, totally ruining the symmetry, panorama and atmosphere of the site. The National Trust car park is on the site of a 1,500-year-old Anglo-Saxon village and at the centre of the whole prehistoric configuration is a pub car park.
I could find no map showing where the different circles, causeways and barrows are. “It’s surprising how many people find their way to them,” says the site's manager, speaking from under a specially-built canopy inside the barn to protect the till area from bat droppings.
At least the visitor centre has all the interactive screens, ‘timelines’ and ‘illuminated models’ thought necessary to interest modern visitors. Yet the biggest exhibit is a car – the beast that has done most to spoil Avebury.
The car in question is a 70-year-old Malvern Torpedo belonging to Marmalade tycoon Alex Keiller, a philanthropic archaeologist responsible for highlighting the importance of the site. Visitors stare across the car’s bonnet to watch a video about his work in which he is described as “a rum sort of cove not to be trusted in taxis”.
And I laughed outloud at one of the National Trust’s po-faced display cabinets. Among flint arrowheads and tools carved from bone, one display reads: “Dog excrement can survive for thousands of years in the right conditions, as here.” The illuminated glass case alongside is empty apart from a folded card reading: “This artefact is currently undergoing conservation work.”
How to get there
Avebury lies six miles west of Marlborough on the A361. The Barn Gallery exhibition centre and old Alexander Keiller Museum are open seven days a week. Joint entry to both is £4.70 for adults. Entry to the stones and surrounding barrows, avenues and iron age earthworks is free.
Useful links
National Trust | Avebury
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