Unlike the far more compact Stonehenge, Avebury is huge. It’s also quite difficult to imagine its structure at ground level - much easier looking down on it from the air. Then you can see the larger outer circle and twin inner circles, the ditch, bank and avenues running off, in serpentine fashion.
These avenues were surely followed by countless generations of our prehistoric ancestors as they processed to the centre, but for what purpose we can only speculate. The seasons would have been critical to them, the changing weather patterns, passage of the sun, even the earth’s magnetic forces would surely have resonated more strongly with them than with us. I venture to suggest that we need our sophisticated technology to capture and interpret signals from the world around us that our ancestors would have been capable of receiving naturally. In our incessant progress we have probably lost much of our innate power; the fine-tuned senses that enable animals to correctly predict the advent of severe weather or catastrophe long before we have an inkling.
Whatever the reason for their creation, stone circles and lone standing stones are a fact. We can see and touch them and, in the U.K. we are fortunate to be blessed with so many, the length and breadth of the land and on the furthest islands off our coasts. In fact, recent archeology up in Orkney (Ness of Brodgar) is throwing up evidence that the culture that built the stone circles originated from far up north, spreading downwards as people travelled and brought their beliefs and practices with them.
These beliefs
must have been hugely important to them and included a ritual of the dead,
judging by the burials that have been discovered. So when Christianity came
along, it as inevitable that a clash would occur between the two opposing sets
of belief. And that, as the victor, the powerful hierarchy in the established
Christian church, where schisms had already occurred, should go all out to destroy
anything that didn’t chime with the exact tenets of its belief. Anything that
wasn’t deemed Christian was automatically a threat. It was inevitable that it wouldn’t
be too long before attention was turned to the stone circles. And soon it was
Avebury’s turn.
Legends and myths
had grown up around these megaliths. Ghosts. Strange lights. Sounds. The stones
were deemed evil. They must be destroyed. And in the 14th century,
the villagers set about trying to obliterate them from their landscape. They
couldn’t shift them manually. Besides, surely it had taken the devil and his
minions to plant them there in the first place so if they couldn’t do that,
they could burn them. Or bury them. Or both. And that is what they set out to
do, digging pits, toppling the stones into them and covering them over. It was
dangerous work. At least one man died – the most famous being a Barber Surgeon,
so named because of the tools that were found with him, although he may simply
have died and been buried under that stone. He was found during excavations by marmalade
heir Alexander Keiller in 1938, still interred under the stone that now bears
his name.
Or maybe… What if
the stones were incorporated into the fabric of the church? Wouldn’t that help
to somehow cleanse the evil? Certainly, in the seventeenth century, some of the
stones was chipped away for use in the building of the chapel but greater use
of the stones came a century later. An infamous builder by the name of Tom
Robinson decided he would build some houses, using the sarsen stone from the felled
stone circles. He employed a workforce to burn and smash the stones for
building material. He complained at the cost of this operation, reckoning it at
£4 per stone owing to the manpower needed to lever the stones into the burning
pits, the costly equipment which often failed or caught fire and needed to be
replaced and all before the cottages were even constructed.
Tom Robinson was
not a popular man. He was reported by contemporary historian, William Stukeley
who called him the Herostratus of Avebury for his destructive habits and his
apparent glorying in the destruction. Apparently the man was not morally sound
in his eyes either as he had ‘got his wife (an old woman above 50) with child.’
Robinson’s cottages were built but it appears the spirits of the stones avenged
themselves for soon after they were completed, they were mysteriously destroyed
n a fire and had to be demolished – at an even greater cost to Robinson. No
doubt Mr Stukeley celebrated when he heard the news.
The use – or abuse
– of the stones continued into the nineteenth century but not without incident.
One man, a cobbler, who had been working on one of the stones, moved away and
almost instantly the stone toppled and would have crushed him to death had he
still been sitting there. Another tried to haul away a heavy stone he had
earmarked for a millstone only to discover he couldn’t move it, even with his
best team of twenty oxen. It ‘broke all his tackle to pieces’. It refused to be
shifted by any means and he had to leave it where it lay. Other though were
more successful and bits of sarsen can be found incorporated into buildings of
the period all over the area
And as for
religion. It seems the spirits and forces of nature combine on occasion. A
parish clerk sheltered from the worst of a terrific thunderstorm, by standing close
up to one of the stones. As he moved away, a bolt of lightning struck that very
stone, cleaving it. The parish clerk, much chastened, hurried away convinced he
had come within an inch of being killed by forces he could only guess at.
The stones at
Avebury hold many secrets and they don’t intend to give them up any time soon.
My latest novel is inspired by these magical stones:
‘Fear her now, fear the queen,
As in her stone she reigns supreme…’
When Jonathan agrees to accompany his girlfriend, Nadia, on a trip to Landane, he imagines a short relaxing break in the countryside. But he quickly discovers that Nadia isn’t just drawn to the ancient Neolithic stone circle, she is obsessed by the megaliths. One in particular. Within hours, her personality begins to change and it isn’t long before Jonathan starts to fear for her sanity.
Reaching far back into the past and up to the present day, those same stones have demonstrated powers beyond reason and, as Jonathan’s girlfriend becomes increasingly distant from reality, some of the ghosts of the past begin to reappear. Now it isn’t only Nadia who is in danger.
What is the secret of the prehistoric standing stones of Landane? What lies within them? And why does an ancient piece of folklore ring so true?
Publishing on January 14th, 2025
Images:
Flame Tree Press
Shutterstock
Abe Books
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