|
|||
|
From excavations at this site, it is known that the Avebury rings once contained
a much larger amount of standing stones and consisted of a more intricate pattern than is
readily visible today. Teh site is normally dated at 2,600-2,500 B.C.Today part of the circle
encloses the village of Avebury.
During the 1300's the local church leaders commanded that the pagan stone circles be
toppled, broken up and/or buried. In more enlightened times, "the Age of Reason" even
more of the stones were pulled from their places to allow for crops to be planted.
The massive stones were then broken into
pieces and used in the construction of homes and other buildings.
At these times, up till the early 1700's, the outline of the Avebury temple
was still visible. Fortunately for us, Dr. William Stukeley,a researcher who often visited this site
as well as neighboring ones, created an excellent record of the site as it was in his time. He attributed
the construction of the site to Druids and he found that the stones were arranged in
an alchemical symbol - a snake going through a circle.
There are indications that Avebury is part of an even larger complex including nearby
Silbury Hill
Recent research of John Michell, Paul Broadhurst and Hamish
Miller have linked Avebury with a network of sacred sites arranged along a nearly two-hundred
mile line stretching across southern England! This line contains Glastonbury
Tor and St.Michael's Mount. A good source for more information about all of this is the book
The Sun and the Serpent by Hamish Miller.
In 1916, a woman was driving along through Wiltshire. It began raining fairly heavily, and she began to look
for a place to stay the night. She left the main road and noticed that the side road she
was traveling was lined by standing stones. Her first thought was that she must be going through
Avebury, which she had heard about but never seen. As she reached the end of the road, she got out of the car to
view the stones. She noticed some cottages around the stones and that there appeared to be
a fair going on in spite of the rain.
The fair had booths set up and the villagers could be seen visiting the various booths, cheering performers,
and walking about the fair with flares and torches. Not one of the villagers was carrying an umbrella
or wearing any type of rain gear.The rain then began coming down in earnest and the woman resumed her journey.
She returned to Avebury nine years later. She read in her guidebook that there had once been an annual fair
in Avebury, but the last one was in 1850! She informed the guide that she had seen one recently
and the guide stated that was impossible. When the woman further tried to explain how she had happened on the fair by describing the road
she had traveled to get there, the guide informed her that the road she was describing did not exist
after 1800.
I know that during our visit to Avebury, the feeling inside the circle is one of discomfort, as
if one were intruding on something. During research about Avebury, I came across the following
article:
Story taken from the Evening Advertiser, Tuesday 16 September 2003.:
For centuries the Red Lion at Avebury has been considered a place alive with ghostly activity, but now it could all just be nothing more than a few good vibrations. Dr Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, has conducted a study into supposedly haunted houses and has concluded that places often thought to be haunted are merely locations prone to a low frequency rumble known as infrasound. The sounds, which can be created by the wind, electrical machinery or passing traffic, are so low they cannot be detected by the human ear. But the body can feel these vibrations and it is this, Dr Wiseman reckons, that accounts for ghoulish goings on and the uncomfortable feelings often felt by people who think they are in a haunted environ.
The 300-year-old Red Lion is situated in the middle of the
4,000-year-old stone circle in picturesque Avebury, which is just ten miles from Swindon.
| |||
|
| |||
