21/09/2020
Virtual Walk number 5 from Calne to Windmill Hill and Avebury.
As we come to the end of the English summer I would like to take you back to the middle of the year, the time of the summer solstice, when we were all deep in a constricting lock-down. Back then I went on a walk from my house to the village of Avebury and I would like you to accompany me on it now.
Famous as the site of an ancient stone circle, there is in fact a whole series of monuments surrounding Avebury village. Within an area of a few square miles there is evidence of concentrated human activities that span well over 2,000 years of our prehistory, from the early Neolithic of Windmill Hill and West Kennet Long Barrow into the Bronze Age, represented by burial mounds ubiquitous on the high grounds. Some of this evidence is still hugely impressive today and it is this extraordinary area that I want to share with you.
Many people visit Avebury from all over the world and one of the most popular days to visit, as at Stonehenge, is at the summer solstice which is usually celebrated on 21st June. Unlike Stonehenge, however, there is actually no evidence that midsummer’s longest day held any significance for the Avebury monument. Nonetheless, it seemed a good time of year to make my personal pilgrimage.
During lock-down Avebury and Stonehenge were both to be shut on this pivotal day of the year. As a result I decided on 19th June for my journey, two days before the official solstice, but near enough to experience everything celestial in the correct place.
So let’s set off and see what we find.
It’s early, very early, but it needs to be because we want to get to Avebury for 04:50 when the golden orb is due to rise in the east. Whether we will actually see it do this is a moot point, the forecast isn’t good. My Met office phone app however gives us a golden glimmer of hope, there is a white cloud with a peeping sun symbol for the sunrise hour.
It had been raining throughout yesterday and there is still the odd drop to wet us as we set off. But it isn’t enough to deter us and excitement gives a spring to our step. Our route out of Calne takes us down ‘Piggy’ Hill to cross the two streams of the river Marden. We have gone only a matter of yards from the end of my street when a roe deer stops and stares at us from the middle of the narrow road. She is seemingly as surprised as we are that humans should be around at this time. Suddenly she remembers to react and springs untidily into the bushes to our left, down a well worn animal track that I have often noticed and thought upon. Now we have met at least one of its travellers and are further excited by the prospect of how much wildlife we can surely expect to see by dawn.
We climb up from the river and turn right onto Low Lane. The houses soon peter out, the tarmac ends and we are on a gravelly track. Deep grey puddles reflect the beams from our torches onto the trees above, their leaves glistening ivory in response. A mile away to our left Penn Hill looks like an enchanted castle, the lights of widely separated houses giving the impression of giant uncurtained windows. It is these lights alone that give the hill a shape in the surrounding dark. The odd chirrup comes from the hedgerows of birds sleeping lightly, aware of our passing presence. High to our right an owl squeals its haunting note as the darkness closes in around us. We turn off the track and down a footpath into woods. It is not the time to be afraid of the dark.
After crossing a wet meadow the path leads us through the works of a gravel extraction company and under the sleeping arm of their stone conveyor. Out of sight I know that deep water fills the pits darkly, and signs warn us of the dangers. A smell I don’t recognise reaches us, remarkably similar to that of rice steaming. It reminds me of passing the Tilda factory on the river east of London some years ago when walking the Thames Path. But there is no rice factory here east of Calne. Maybe the wet night air encourages a plant that at other times lies timid, unwilling to reveal its presence.
We soon come to the end of the footpath and turn right onto the road that, to our left, bends shortly into Compton Basset. It really does feel very dark now with just a faint town-orange glow in the sky to our right. A soft drizzle starts to fall. It’s actually quite welcome along with the breeze in my face, coolly pleasant as we strut purposefully along while, in our torchlight, the grass by the side of the road adds the grey-blue hue of narrow rosemary leaves.
We turn left to walk through a patch of woodland with its characteristic damp, earthy aroma (I love this though many others might not) and head up the lane towards Cherhill. As we reach the first houses of Marsh Lane new scents reach us, those of moth-attracting garden flowers: we are in a human environment. The darkness seems to make our noses more aware of our surroundings, encouraging a fuller use of our senses.
We climb steadily through the village. Though hidden at night I’m aware of the hill to our right after which the village takes its name: Cher Hill or, as some suggest, Caer Hill. Caer, possibly from the Latin Castrum, and often seen in place names such as Cardiff and Cardigan, is the Welsh for castle/fortress. And surmounting the hill is the iron age hill-fort known as Oldbury Castle after which I take my name.
We continue on. It starts to rain more heavily as we pass St. James Church with its hidden Roman mosaic. Not all of it was exposed when it was discovered in 1913 but the part that was, featured a hunting dog and is now in the wonderful Wiltshire Museum in Devizes. There is much evidence of the Romano-British culture around here with the important Roman Road to Londinium running its straight course on the other side of the Cher hill. Presumably a forgotten spur led from that road to the villa that once stood grandly in this place.
At the end of the village we turn left then immediately right along a byway beneath tall trees, where startled pigeons flap off into the night rain. How ancient these tracks are it is impossible to know. Dating back to Roman times?; Iron Age?; before that? They may well have linked farmsteads and small settlements since the Bronze Age..
Cherhill, as we have seen, and Yatesbury, on our route now, both have evidence of Romano-British occupation. People, I feel sure, were treading this path in those times and many routes across the land would have already been well established. What I do know is that these byways often feel very old as you walk them, following the footsteps of times long past.
The rain has stopped now, my hood comes down and there is an even silence; the odd leaf rustles in the trees but the air is still. We hope it isn’t the calm before a storm.
Now we pass between wide open fields on a good track. Puddles, unevenly spaced, make us double our distance as we zig and zag forwards. Next we come to a long line of mature elegant trees. Poplar perhaps, but it is hard to tell in the dark. Some, ivy-clad, with small glossy leaves; their exposed peaks whistle in the occasional breeze. And, looking up at them, we think maybe the sky is lightening a touch.
We turn right and immediately left down the grandly named ‘Avenue’, a small but nonetheless proper road with white markings that takes us into Yatesbury. As we progress down it, it does start to live up to its name, trees forming an arch over our heads.
Coming out of Yatesbury we pass the plastic greenhouses of Shumei Natural Agriculture. I was intrigued when I heard of a Japanese sect farming this little area of Wiltshire so I went to an open day a few years back. As well as enjoying a traditional tea ceremony we were served a vegan meal all created from their home produce - no chemicals, no pesticides, no fertilisers or animal manures. They don’t practice crop rotation or even w**d between the plants! The opening sentence of their website runs ‘Just like music or painting, farming is an art whose product touches your soul.’
It was a surreal but lovely day when I also met for the first time Steve Marshall, an extraordinary musician/archaeologist who has written a superb guide book for the Avebury area. We have got on well ever since on the odd occasion we have crossed archaeological paths.
We are walking pretty much due east and the sky is definitely starting to brighten ahead of us now. The rain starts to fall gently again as we hear a beautiful and reassuring sound, the sweet silver song of the lark. We have an old saying ‘to be up with the lark’ meaning ‘to be an early riser’, so it is nice to be able to confirm that, after the night-calls have ended, the first bird to be heard in these parts is indeed a skylark; it is just before 4am.
The track gives way to a narrow path between knee-high sodden grasses, open fields again to our right. Since leaving Calne we have been following a designated national cycle route, route 403, but at the end of the field we part company with it for the first time, turning left towards Windmill Hill. The muddy path takes us through the overhanging branches of a dripping copse before we emerge in a clearing with Windmill Hill a short distance straight ahead of us.
We climb steadily up a deeply rutted track. Torches off now, there is enough light to see although it is still half an hour before sunrise. More birds have joined the lark as we enter the woods of the hill. Here we are back in darkness, hidden from daybreak, until we turn right to climb steeply up the western grassy slope. As it levels out we head straight towards the Bronze Age burial mound that crowns Windmill Hill and sit down on a plastic rug to wait.
As the day considers its dawning perhaps it is a good time to talk of our purpose today so please allow me a brief diversion.
The Avebury area was a real ‘destination’ for me during my childhood, I used to cycle here with my brother from Marlborough. It had a powerful affect on me then and has never lost its draw, but this is the first time I have walked here from my home. My objective today, and what I am attempting to describe, is to arrive at this great Neolithic complex as people did when it was first built: I want to experience an arrival on foot.
There is nothing in the UK archaeological record, no unearthed bones of the right period, to suggest that the people of the Neolithic period (4,000 - 2,400BC) had tamed horses. This means that to get to any ceremonial centre such as Avebury or Stonehenge they would have had to walk. And what we now know, thanks largely to the discoveries of the Stonehenge Riverside Project (2004 – 2009), is that they were prepared to walk a very, very, very long way.
One of the main foci of the Stonehenge Riverside Project was a site called Durrington Walls just a couple of miles from Stonehenge itself. Here the remains of houses were uncovered from deep below the ploughed soil beside the river Avon. By dating excavated organic material such as animal bones the archaeologists were able to demonstrate that people lived in these houses for a fairly brief period about 4,500 years ago. This was the time that the largest stones were being introduced into the Stonehenge monument – the archaeologists had found, they claimed, the homes of the builders of Stonehenge. And I’m sure they are right.
However, these old bones can reveal much more than just a date, impressive enough as that may be. Hidden within them are trace elements that reveal the underlying geology where the bones were formed; that is to say, from analysing the enamel of the teeth in particular it can be determined where a neolithic cow or pig grew up. Water takes on minerals from the soil which pass on into the grass and on again into the young grazing animal whose tooth enamel is forming. Reverse this process and you find where the animal was reared. Simple in theory, now amazing in practice and extraordinarily revealing.
Thousands of bones were unearthed from pits at Durrington Walls, the remains of massive feasts, and the samples that were analysed revealed that people had travelled from all over the UK, perhaps from as far away as Scotland to join the party, bringing their animals with them. And from the age of the animals when they were butchered we are pretty sure it was a solstice festival they were travelling for, in Stonehenge’s case the Winter Solstice.
Although nowadays we tend to focus purely on 21st June or 22nd December for our solstices such events weren’t always necessarily so micro managed. In fact the word ‘solstice’ comes from Latin roots which mean ‘the sun standing still’. And so it does at these times of year.
As the year progresses the place of sunrise and sunset differs every day between north east and south east for dawn and north west and south west in the evening. For approximately a week on either side of the solstices, however, the change in the Sun’s position at dawn and dusk is largely imperceptible, hence solstice.
My guess is that people would have been arriving at established ritual centres like Stonehenge or this one at Windmill Hill throughout a designated festival period. It is my belief that when people had to travel such distances for a ceremony, the festivities must have lasted for more than one day.
Sitting on top of the hill here at Windmill Hill we have a complete panorama and it is easy to see why this place would have been so attractive as a meeting place. People travelling would have been able to see their destination for the last few miles of their journey from whichever direction they approached. And then they would have had the satisfaction, the sense of achievement, the relief of their arrival.
Excavations in the 1920s, led by the eccentric Scottish millionaire Alexander Keiller, established that Windmill Hill had been a very important place to people during the Early Neolithic period from about 3,700BC. Three concentric rings of ditches encircle the hilltop, the outer ring having a diameter of 360 metres and enclosing an area of over 8 hectares (20 acres). The ditches were dug up to three metres down, exposing the soft white chalk and piling it internally to form a bank. The ditches don’t run continuously however but have frequent land bridges (causeways) across them to allow access to the centre through corresponding gaps in the banks. This has led to the naming of this type of monument as Causewayed Enclosures.
The hilltop is bare now with shin high grasses, nettles and a carpet of white clover at this time of year. Sheep are often pastured here. But the archaeological evidence tells us that the enclosure was built in a woodland clearing, a special hill top place; a natural space perhaps closer to the heavens and away from everyday life.
There are over a hundred of these causewayed enclosures in the UK according to English Heritage’s dedicated book on the subject. Rather than being permanently lived in they seem to have served as places where tribes came together at certain times of year, perhaps those pivotal moments dictated by the position of the sun. As at Durrington Walls, pottery, flint tools and thousands of animal bones suggest large-scale feasts. What hasn’t been done to my knowledge is similar research into the provenance of the bones. But some of the tools and pottery suggest widespread movement of people or at least extensive trading with other parts of the UK even at this early date.
I was going to go on to Avebury itself for sunrise but decide that since I have never been on Windmill Hill for a solstice sunrise, as I have in Avebury, we would stay put. There is no-one else up here, rather unsurprisingly, but once it would perhaps have been teeming with people at this special time of year; a bustling market place with families reunited or welcoming in new members maybe. Music and feasting coming later in the day perhaps. We don’t know whether it was a solemn or a joyful occasion but between us we can decide that a mixture of both would probably be appropriate.
As the time of dawn approaches the wind is picking up from the south, pushing low grey clouds ahead of it, and the rain is becoming more and more persistent sleeting across us from right to left. As more clouds arrive we become blanketed in grey on our hill top and it becomes evident that, today at least, we won’t see our golden sky. The moment passes in grey but we don’t worry because tomorrow the sun will rise in the same place and should we still be here, then we could give our thanks.
We do eventually head down into Avebury and wonder if this is the first time in four and a half thousand years that the monument has been closed to travellers. The village itself is silent and we wander into the stone circles damp and alone.
I am going to head home now on a different route through fields of ripening barley and linseed which, even in the rain, are a reminder of the harvest’s future hopes. The rain is falling more heavily and consistently now and the blustering wind, my least favourite element, is getting stronger. But I have determined to walk on however hard the going may be and, to be honest, there isn’t much of an alternative option.
I want to leave you in Avebury with the words from a song by Oscar Hammerstein II. We didn’t see dawn this morning but this year has unfortunately taken many people from us, people that won’t witness the next solstice at all, whether grey or golden.
The song is famously the anthem for Liverpool football team who won the Premiership this strange summer for the first time in 30 years. My family are all supporters of LFC but, more importantly, so was the son of a friend of mine who very sadly passed away in May aged only 34 after a long illness. This was sung extremely emotionally at his graveside and I still had it very much in mind couple of days later as I walked to Windmill Hill in the dark:
When you walk through a storm hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark
At the end of a storm there’s a golden sky
And the sweet silver song of the lark
Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown
Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone;
You’ll never walk alone.
Please visit my website for more information about the Avebury area or to enquire about a tour in the UNESCO Avebury and Stonehenge World Heritage site. I look forward to showing you around.
