Avebury: the circle you can walk through, and the parts that are concrete

Avebury is the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. Its henge encloses roughly eleven hectares, contains two smaller inner circles, and has a village built inside it — houses, a pub, a road running through the stones.

It was built in stages between roughly 2850 and 2200 BC, and it is connected by the West Kennet Avenue, a double line of standing stones running about two and a half kilometres to another monument.

What was done to it

A great deal, and mostly deliberately.

In the medieval period, stones were pulled down and buried, apparently as a response to the monument's pagan associations. Later, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stones were broken up with fire and water for building material.

By the 1930s a large proportion of the circle was gone.

What Keiller did

Alexander Keiller, heir to the Dundee marmalade fortune, bought the site in the 1930s and excavated and restored it.

He located buried stones and re-erected them. Where a stone hole existed but the stone was gone, he set a concrete marker in its place.

That is the crucial thing for anyone standing in the circle: a substantial part of what is visible was put back up in the 1930s, and the squat concrete plinths are not weathered stumps but modern markers. He also cleared buildings from the site.

Keiller recorded what he did, which is why we can say this. His work was careful for its period and is also, unavoidably, an interpretation set in the ground.

Reading a reconstructed site

Keiller's work raises a question that applies well beyond Avebury: how should a visitor read a monument that has been substantially rebuilt?

The concrete markers are the honest part — they announce themselves as modern. The re-erected stones are harder, because a stone found buried in its own socket and stood back up is both authentic and placed by a twentieth-century decision about its orientation and depth.

Keiller documented what he did, which is what distinguishes his work from the Victorian restorations that left no record. The distinction between evidence and interpretation survives in his archive.

The wider landscape

Avebury does not stand alone. Within a few kilometres are Silbury Hill, the West Kennet Long Barrow, the Sanctuary and Windmill Hill. It is one connected ritual landscape built and modified over more than a thousand years.

Reading any one element in isolation is the commonest mistake made about it.