Avebury is the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world, so large that a village grew up within it, and it anchors one of the densest ceremonial landscapes in Neolithic Europe.
Scale and design
Built in the third millennium BCE, the monument consists of a huge circular bank and inner ditch, about 420 metres across, enclosing the outer stone circle and two smaller circles within. The bank once stood far higher and the ditch far deeper than they now appear. Two avenues of paired standing stones led away from it across the countryside. The enclosed area is large enough that part of the modern village of Avebury sits inside it, its houses and pub among the megaliths.
A landscape, not a monument
Avebury is best understood as one element of a connected sacred landscape. Nearby stand Silbury Hill, the largest artificial prehistoric mound in Europe, whose purpose remains unknown; the West Kennet Long Barrow, a chambered tomb used over centuries; and the timber and stone settings of the Sanctuary. The relationships between these, and the processional routes linking them, suggest a coordinated ritual geography rather than a single building project.
Damage, recovery and use
In the medieval and early modern periods many stones were buried or broken up, some out of Christian suspicion of a pagan monument, some for building material; one burial preserved the skeleton of a man crushed while toppling a stone. In the twentieth century the marmalade magnate and archaeologist Alexander Keiller re-erected fallen stones and marked the positions of lost ones. Avebury is a World Heritage site, cared for by the National Trust and English Heritage, and, like Stonehenge, a focus of contemporary Pagan and Druid observance.