Stonehenge Rocks!!!

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Well I am off to the States soon, but I thought I would kick start my blog with my weekend away, and hopefully get the hang of using this site!

The plan was to visit Stonehenge and Avebury today, spend the night with my aunt and travel back on Sunday morning. We woke up to a torrential downpour, but not one to be put off by a bit of good old soggy British weather I insisted we stick to the plan... after all we had three hours in the car ahead of us and the sun might well have put in an appearance by then! I was almost right. We arrived at Stonehenge to find it overcast but thankfully dry.

I was somewhat surprised by Stonehenge. I knew it was on a road, but I had at least pictured a small country road with a fair bit of surrounding countryside. I was a bit disappointed to find one of the most famous landmarks in Britian stuck on a triangle of grass between two roads. We parked in the small car park and I had another shock. Okay, so I knew in theory that Stonehenge was a tourist destination, but being both an English Heritage and National Trust site I was expecting the usual middle class English familes with their green wellies and precocious children with maybe a few foreigners thrown in. I was therefore quite taken aback to find the car park filled with two coach loads of Japanese tourists, another three coach loads of Americans, quite a few Germans, and endless other foreigners all swarming towards the entrance. We wandered through the milling crowds and found ourselves at the back of a massive queue. Fortunately we spied an English Heritage employee and casually asked if there was a seperate queue for members or whether we would have to stay in the huge queue of tourists to get tickets. The woman took one look at our life membership cards and laughed. She showed us through another entrance and said 'Life members? Treat it like your back garden - pop in and out as you like!'
Well, I for one am quite chuffed - it's not everyday I get permission to regard Stonehenge as my own back garden!!!

We walked through the 'time tunnel', basically a pathway bordered with wooden planks with paintings on ... about as exciting as the plain black time tunnel used at Kentwell Hall for travelling back to Tudor times!!
We approached the stone circle and it was amazing to see a scene that was so familiar from pictures and photographs and yet so much more impressive than those images could convey. It didn't matter that the stones were surrounded by a rope barrier, that the sounds of traffic could still be heard or that it was cold, damp and busy. It was a powerful and awe-inspiring scene and nothing was going to change that.

We walked around taking photographs while it was still dry and the stormy clouds actually made for some rather atmospheric shots.

We returned to the car for some hot tea and food. It was only 10am but we'd got up at 6am and it was cold outside so the tea was much appreciated. After warming up we returned to the stone circle and took the audio tour as we walked around again. It was really interesting and hearing the history while looking at the stones really made me appreciate how incredible Stonehenge is.


The earth works where Stonehenge stands were creaed over 5,000 years ago. It is believed that a wooden structure stood at the centre and was later replaced by the stone circle. The stone circle was constructed, arranged and re-arranged over a period of 1,000 years and the monument we see today is around 3,500 years old. The large Sarsen stones were brought from the Marlborough Downs 19 miles away while the smaller Bluestones were brought a staggering 240 miles from the Preseli Mountains in Wales. The stones were shaped with pieces of bone and then moved and raised to form the stone circle.

We drove onto Woodhenge, which is now nothing more than a set of cocrete markers showing where the wooden posts would have origninally stood. The skeleton of a three year old girl with a smashed skull was found at the site and is believed to be the only case of human sacrifce in Britain at the time. Visitors had placed flowers on a stone in the centre of the circle, for a little girl who had died thousands of years ago.

We went on to Avebury stone circle, passing Silsbury Hill, the great burial mound, on the way. The weather brightened for us and it was actually sunny and warm by the time we reached Avebury. Avebury village was lovely, built within the vast stone circle with a small country road running through the central circle and the monoliths of the farthest circle standing in cow fields and even people's back gardens! As it is just past the summer solstice there were quite a few pagans in the area, many of whom were dressed up. It was almost as if time had converged in one area and peoples from all different time periods were celebrating in the village together. There was a couple standing on the hill in full Anglo-Saxon costume, a group of girls in mediaeval dress were hugging trees, a few hippy types wandered around looking like they just strolled out of the 60s, and the local druids tumbled out of the pub in very steroetypical long white tunics with garlands of oak leaves in their hair and wooden staffs in their hands, trailed by a group of bemused loking policemen.

It was a beautiful place to visit and I really enjoyed the day. We left Avenury and went to my aunts for the night. We travel back home tomorrow.

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