Stonehenge and Avebury

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So before we set out from the lovely, medieval town of Wells on our adventure to Stonehenge and Avebury, we’d been assured by pretty much everyone that Stonehenge would be “a disappointment” and that Avebury would be a much better and more accessible ancient ruinous site.  We came upon Stonehenge and decided to determine whether or not we wanted to spend the money to get into the site itself.

When we approached, we saw that not only was the whole area chain-link fenced off but even if you had paid the money to get into it, you’d only be able to get about 100 feet away from the stones.  This was truly disappointing.  So, we saved our money, took pictures from the outside, and enjoyed our picnic lunch in the parking lot while listening to tour guides complain about how difficult their jobs are and how hard it is to keep track of how many boxed lunches they have given out and how much money they have collected – too funny!

Excited to keep moving and get to Avebury in time to romp and frolic with the stones, we set-off.  The Avebury site is also an ancient but less well-known Druid archeological site – 16x the size of Stonehenge and with just as much historical significance.  When we arrived to the area, we were excited to see that we could walk right up to the 25 ton stones – taking pictures and even sitting on some of the low, stable looking ones.  The main difference (aside from accessibility and size) that we could see was that Avebury didn’t have any of the smaller 17 ton stones resting horizontally on any of the vertical stones.  One other really cool thing about Avebury was the sheep grazing in and among the stones — cool but also very poop-ridden.

Visiting the Avebury site is a definite must-do — it was a really cool ancient site and confluence of ley lines.   The town was cute and quaint and filled with Druidic history and the surrounding area was steeped with tradition and folklore – we even glimpsed some of the enormous chalk carvings of horses and other designs in the mounds en route to Avebury.  Too cool!

Maybe even cooler than Avebury was our visit to Mr. Wilkin’s apple farm in the tiny village of Mudgley where he makes delicious scrumpy — it was a total “back door” moment and we got a kick out of watching him work — he was two weeks behind schedule for harvesting and a bit too busy to spend a lot of time with us but the drink was great and we bought 2 liters to go — yummm!!!