Stones on the Move: The Ritual Pathways of Avebury’s Three Stone Avenues.
- apeach5
- Oct 6
- 14 min read
Updated: Oct 13
Welcome to Stone Temple Gardening, where we dig deep to cultivate new understandings of the ancient past! Today's post returns to the magnificent megalithic sacred landscape of Avebury. I have already written about this site and, more specifically, the astonomy built into its weathered stones. Today we move away from the circle, henge and its settings into the wider landscape via the three processional stone avenues attached to the site. If you are unfamilier with the wider story of Avebury, Stonehenge's big but often forgotten sister site, you can read about her here, here and here.
The Avenues of Avebury
To enter the megalithic henge of Avebury is to cross a threshold that still steals the breath. The vast ditch and bank do not merely enclose the village—they enfold it, a colossal embrace hewn from the bone-white chalk five millennia ago. The partially restored stones rise from the turf like a shattered ring of giants: grey, scarred, and endlessly patient. They forms lean and twist at odd angles, as if caught mid-turn, their faces weathered into masks that watch both the tourists and the grazing sheep. Beneath their stillness runs a low current—the faint hum of a landscape that remembers its ancient rites, long lost to us down the deep well of time.
Avebury is both utterly familiar and utterly strange. Sheep graze in fields where once the dead were carried, where processions wound in slow rhythm beneath the weight of ceremony. Cars now nose noisily between monoliths that have stood in silence since before the first word was scratched into clay. The air here still feels charged, as if the very wind itself keeps the secret of ancient movement around the stones; even on still days, a faint vibration seems to rise from the earth like breath from a sleeping giant. To truly know this place, one must not merely observe it from the distance of a book or screen, but experience it bodily—senses attuned—walking its paths and circles, spiralling outward through its entrances into the avenues that lead away like arteries from a heart. One of these carries you toward the lost ritual site of the Sanctuary; another, once doubted but now confirmed, winds to the astronomically aligned Beckhampton Cove and its nearby long barrows; while a third, long forgotten, climbs the flank of Waden Hill before descending beneath the great mound of Silbury to its own miniature counterpart and possible Neolithic jetty.
These stones were never still. They gathered people into patterns of movement and meaning, guiding their steps, framing the heavens, shaping the land into a theatre of transformation. And though millennia have passed, they endure—some as standing stones, others as buried shadows—like the rivers that carved the chalk, or the sky itself, which still leans down to meet them.
The stones endure, not as relics but as quiet participants in the turning of the seasons, the shaping of clouds, the long memory of earth. Their presence extends beyond the great circle itself. Avebury is not a single monument but a sacred landscape, its heart pulsing through a network of satellite shrines and processional routes. These avenues of stone once gathered the living and the dead alike into ordered motion, carrying them between water and sky. Today, only one survives in part, but in their time they bound the land into a geometry of meaning.
Most visitors know the West Kennet Avenue, winding southeast toward the lost circle of the Sanctuary, and a few have heard of the mostly vanished Beckhampton Avenue, bending southwest toward the surviving Longstones Cove. Yet there was also a third, almost forgotten: the Silbury Avenue, running toward the great mound and ending at its smaller echo, the enigmatic “Silbaby.” Together, these three formed a triadic system of ceremonial routes, weaving the henge into its river valley and the wider chalklands. To trace them is to see for a moment as the Neolithic once did — through alignments, horizons, water, and stone.
Antiquarians: Aubrey and Stukeley
Our earliest modern witnesses to these sites approached Avebury in very different moods. Pioneer antiquarian John Aubrey, ever the cataloguer, first noted Avebury in the 1660s and set about describing its stones, ditches, and avenues with a mixture of precision and awe. He recorded sockets, orientations, and fragments of folklore with the sober air of a man trying to rescue the evidence of the past from the neglect of his present. For Aubrey, Avebury was a wonder equal to Stonehenge, perhaps even greater, but it was to be measured and documented rather than embellished and explained.
His younger contemporary William Stukeley could not resist the dramatisation. Visiting in the 1710s and 1720s, he was horrified at the destruction already wrought by villagers breaking stones for building. Stukeley preserved Avebury in words and engravings just as it was being erased. Yet his vision went further: he saw not simply a circle with avenues but a cosmic serpent, the body of the snake winding through the Beckhampton Avenue, the head formed by the henge itself. Stukeley’s “serpent temple” was part reconstruction, part revelation, coloured by his belief in a patriarchal, Druidic religion of natural philosophy.
The serpent has long been dismissed as fantasy, but it speaks to a deeper truth: Avebury’s avenues are not peripheral add-ons but integral to the monument. Stukeley intuited that the stones in motion — their sinuous lines across fields and ridges — mattered as much as the static circle. Aubrey gave us evidence; Stukeley gave us vision. Between them, Avebury was secured for posterity.
Keiller and the Work of Reconstruction
By the early twentieth century, Avebury was a patchwork ruin: many stones broken, others toppled, and houses built atop ancient sockets. Into this stepped Alexander Keiller, marmalade heir turned archaeologist, who in the 1930s purchased much of the site, demolished cottages, and set about restoring Avebury with an industrial determination. He employed local men, established a museum, and above all sought to re-erect stones.
Keiller’s methods combined excavation with reconstruction. Where sockets survived, he confirmed the position of missing stones. When a sarsen lay buried or fragmented, he pieced it together and raised it again. Critics then and since have accused him of overzealousness, of creating a modern simulacrum rather than preserving antiquity. Yet beneath almost every re-erected stone lay a genuine socket. His restorations, while bold, were rooted in archaeological evidence.
It is thanks to Keiller that the West Kennet Avenue now stands as a line of stones again, rather than a scatter of buried stumps. He understood that Avebury was not simply to be measured but to be walked — and walking required stones to stand. His vision was closer to Stukeley’s than Aubrey’s, though tempered by excavation. In restoring Avebury as a place of processional movement, he gave us back the sense of avenues as corridors of ritual.
The West Kennet Avenue
The best known of Avebury’s avenues, West Kennet stretches for nearly 2.4 kilometres, running southeast from the henge toward the Sanctuary, a timber circle once set high above the Kennet valley. Excavation and Keiller’s restorations have revealed its design: a double row of paired stones forming a broad passageway some 15–20 metres wide. The stones diminish in scale as they recede from the henge, their shapes alternating between tall, upright pillars and squat, broad slabs—terms that William Stukeley famously cast as “male” and “female.” Whether or not such gendered readings hold, the alternation is deliberate. It creates a rhythm in stone, a visual pulse that guides the body outward.
To walk the West Kennet Avenue today is to feel oneself drawn into this rhythm. The path narrows and widens, horizons open and close, and in the distance the Sanctuary beckons. The avenue is not straight but curves gently, bending sightlines, masking and revealing, shaping the journey as much as any destination. Archaeology places its construction around 2500–2200 BCE, during the great flowering of late Neolithic monument building. This was the age of the Beaker people, who brought with them hardier animals, richer crops, new techniques in farming—and most transformative of all, the new alchemy of metalworking.
The Sanctuary itself, now reduced to concrete markers, was once a complex timber monument, later rebuilt in stone. Its purpose remains mysterious, but a ritual area or even roofed temple is most likely in my opinion.
To walk from Avebury to the Sanctuary was to move through a sequence of worlds: from the ditch and bank of the henge lead to the guiding lines of sarsen, to timber rising on the chalk ridge, and finally to the open sky. This was no casual path but a ceremonial route, perhaps repeated with the seasons, perhaps marking the passages of life and death.
The avenue’s southeast trajectory has also drawn attention from archaeoastronomers. Alexander Thom argued that its orientation may have been calculated to frame the rising sun at midwinter, or even the extreme positions of the moon during its 18.6-year cycle—the so-called major lunar standstill that we are currently experiencing in 2024/5. Such alignments, if intended, would have made processions along the avenue resonate not only with earthly movement but with celestial rhythms, tying ritual journeys to the turning of the heavens. Later scholars, most notably arch debunker of Thom, Professor Clive Ruggles, have urged caution, arguing that while broad orientations to the solstices are plausible, the evidence for precise astronomical targeting is too weak to sustain Thom’s claims (personally, I disagree with Ruggles on this point, his own methodology contains a key flaw in my opinion). Yet the very curve of the avenue—masking and revealing horizons—suggests an engagement with light, movement, and sky that cannot be dismissed outright (Thom 1967; Ruggles 1999, 2005).
When Keiller and his collaborator Stuart Piggott re-erected many of the fallen stones of the West Kennet Avenue in the 1930s, they observed a curious rhythm in their shapes: tall, angular monoliths alternating with broader, more rounded forms. They came to see these alternations as deliberate — a sculptural dialogue between masculine and feminine, projecting into stone the dualities of life and creation. Whether this was truly a Neolithic intention or a modern projection is still debated, yet the pattern remains compelling. Walking the Avenue today, one can sense this pulse of alternation, as if each pair of stones were breathing — a procession of opposites leading the pilgrim from the great henge toward the rising ground of the Sanctuary, from enclosure to exposure, from death to renewal.
Taken together, these features reveal that West Kennet was not merely a route between monuments, but a carefully choreographed journey. Its alternation of forms, its play of sightlines, and its possible celestial alignments all worked in concert to transform movement into meaning. To process along the avenue was to pass through a world ordered by stone, earth, and sky—a world where architecture was inseparable from orientation, and where ritual practice unfolded within a landscape attuned to cosmic cycles.
The Beckhampton Avenue
Less famous but no less significant, the now lost Beckhampton Avenue curved southwest from the henge toward the Longstones Cove, where two massive sarsens still stand proud in their green field. William Stukeley’s early drawings showed the avenue snaking into the valley, but for centuries many dismissed him, assuming his vision of a “serpent temple” had led him astray. Excavations in the 1990s by Mark Gillings and Josh Pollard proved otherwise: stone sockets survive, confirming Beckhampton as a true monumental avenue, though its layout was more irregular than the measured rhythm of West Kennet.
Where West Kennet carries the traveller uphill toward timber and chalk ridge, Beckhampton draws them downslope into wetter ground. In the late Neolithic, this valley was a marshy floodplain, its channels shifting with climate and season. The avenue appears to dissolve into these lowlands rather than conclude at a fixed grand monument like the Sanctury. By the Bronze Age the marsh dried, ridges had thickened with barrows, and the landscape hardened. The marshes of Britain were often used for ritual deposits and prayers. In its day Beckhampton may have also led to a ceremonial liminal edge — bogs are a place where earth meets water, where journeys may have ended in offerings, transformation, or dissolution as is present elswhere.
At its terminal point are the two sarsens of Adam and Eve forming the end of the avenue and part of the Longstones Cove itself, that echoes the form of Avebury’s northern inner circle, where another Cove framed a chamber-like space. The Beckhampton Cove’s stones are aligned in such a way that they may reference the setting sun at midwinter, creating a dramatic point of termination that fused horizon, monument, and season (Thom 1967; Burl 2002). To walk Beckhampton, then, was to move from circle to cove, from enclosure into exposure, from the solid ground of the living into the shifting waters of the ancestral realm, all under the gaze of a cosmic order marked by sun and stone.
The Silbury Avenue and the Silbaby Mound
For centuries only two avenues were known, and Avebury’s pattern seemed symmetrical enough. Yet recent discoveries have revealed a third: the Silbury Avenue. Running southeast across Waden Hill toward Silbury Hill, it adds another strand to Avebury’s choreography of movement.
Identified formally in 2014 through aerial photography and survey, Silbury Avenue is marked by at least nineteen pairs of stone sockets. These define a corridor about 470 metres up the ridge and perhaps stretching to 1.47 kilometres, with stones spaced roughly 25 metres apart — matching the scale of West Kennet and Beckhampton. Neolithic pottery and flint found nearby support its early date, and the avenue clearly predates the barrows that later crowned the ridge.
Unlike Beckhampton, Silbury Avenue does not branch away but radiates directly from the henge, on its own course. It probably carried processions towards or from Silbury Hill itself: the great artificial chalk mound rising 30 metres above the Kennet valley, the largest Neolithic mound in Europe and the most enigmatic of Avebury's monuments.
At its terminus lay a lesser mound, the so-called “Silbaby” or Waden Mount. About 20 metres across, its chalk core contained Neolithic charcoal rather than the previously imagined post-medieval spoil, confirming its antiquity. Its rounded profile mimics Silbury, and it lies beside a spur channeling water from Waden Spring. Perhaps it served as a riverside platform — a stable point for loading boats, for staging offerings, or for ceremonies directed toward the looming bulk of Silbury Hill. Or even more speculativly, a possible disembarkation point for some of the the stones of the monument itself
Silbury Hill itself has long attracted astronomical speculation. Thom suggested it was part of a deliberate solstitial scheme, its summit platform perhaps used to observe horizon events (Thom 1967). More recent analyses, however, such as those by the ever sceptical Ruggles (1999), have cast doubt on such precision, while still acknowledging that its commanding placement above the valley lends itself naturally to celestial observation. (That, I believe, is called having it both ways! I have touched upon the conservative resistance from mainstream arcaeology to Thom and others here). The Silbury Avenue, pointing toward this artificial horizon, may therefore have framed a ritual journey not only to the mound but also to the heavens it reflected.
The rediscovery of Silbury Avenue and Silbaby owes much to the persistence of local researcher and photographer Pete Glastonbury, who used LiDAR and historic mapping to trace their lines and campaigned for their recognition. His work shows how local insight can redirect scholarship: once dismissed, Silbaby is now seen as integral to Avebury’s ceremonial network.
Silbury Avenue transforms our understanding of the complex. Avebury is no longer a balanced pair of avenues but a hub with three radiating arms: eastward to the timber Sanctuary, southwest to the watery lowlands of Beckhampton, and southeast to the towering mound of Silbury. This triadic pattern suggests choice, complexity, and layering. Silbury was not merely an isolated mound, but the climax of a stone-lined journey — one mirrored, answered, and framed by its miniature counterpart, and perhaps aligned with the turning of the sky itself.
Comparative Monuments
Avenues are not unique to Avebury. At Stonehenge, the Avenue runs from circle to river, aligning with the midsummer sunrise. At Carnac in Brittany, thousands of stones form endless parallel rows across kilometres. Yet Avebury’s avenues differ. They are neither Carnac’s endless fields nor Stonehenge’s single axis, but branching routes linking multiple monuments.
The comparison with Carnac is instructive: there, lines of stones may have been arenas for gatherings, perhaps musical or processional, their sheer multiplicity overwhelming. Avebury is more structured, each avenue leading to a specific destination — Sanctuary, Longstones, Silbury. Where Carnac is diffuse, Avebury is nodal.
Stonehenge’s Avenue is more akin to a processional route binding monument to river and sky. Yet Stonehenge has one avenue; Avebury has three. Its complexity of routes makes it more city than temple, more network than axis.
Conclusion: Walking with Stones
To walk Avebury today is to walk with ghosts. Aubrey, noting the stones with antiquarian curiosity; Stukeley, sketching serpents and imagining druidic rites; Keiller, re-erecting fallen sarsens; Glastonbury, tracing vanished avenues and campaigning for their recognition. Each has left an imprint on the landscape, but the stones themselves carry the oldest memory. Weathered, hoary and fractured, they are simulacra of their former selves, their grey surfaces betraying centuries of sun, rain, frost, and human attention.
Thousands of years since they were first thrust into the dreaming landscape of prehistoric Wiltshire, the avenues of Avebury still guide us. West Kennet leads uphill to the Sanctuary, Beckhampton curves into the watery valley toward the Longstones, Silbury Avenue stretches toward the monumental mound and its miniature echo, Silbaby. Each path is a choreography of movement, rhythm, and orientation. To follow them is to feel the pulse of a Neolithic world, where journey and place were inseparable, where stone, earth, timber, and water intersected in ritual patterns, and where processions along chalk and sarsen carried meaning as surely as any spoken word.
Avebury is also a monument of the sky. Its alignments may trace solstices, lunar standstills, or the rhythms of the sun across the valley. Light and shadow still touch the avenues in ways that would have framed human movement, offering both spectacle and instruction. The landscape itself—its ridges, rivers, and mounds—is not a backdrop but an active participant in this choreography, shaping vision, marking time, and providing a stage for human ritual.
To walk Avebury is to move within time itself — not as a line but as a living circle. The stones, avenues, and mounds carry us across millennia, teaching that movement was once ritual, that orientation was a form of knowledge, that journey itself was meaning. They invite us to join their choreography: to follow their lines, to trace the circles, to pause where the horizon folds, to listen where the earth still hums. Avebury is not a monument to observe but a world to inhabit — a continuing dialogue between stone and human, past and present, earth and sky, threshold and spirit.
Dr Alexander Peach
October 2025
Bibliography
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Beautiful, thank you for sharing your experience, I have an entirely new way of perceiving Avebury after reading this.
Thank you for this very thorough and detailed account which explores all avenues (literally and metaphorically!) Using my intuitive senses walking up the West Kennet Avenue, I cam to my own astonishing discovery, recorded in my blog, Rethinking 'Primitive' with the Avebury Stones, https://www.spiritoftherainbow.org/blog/posts/rethinking-primitive-with-the-avebury-stones which may be of interest to some readers.
It all sounds very fascinating! I’d like to take a deeper look when I have more time. Avebury sounds like a holy, sacred place that should be protected. Perhaps, even a portal as well. Namaste 🙏🏼💕🙏🏼