Beckhampton Avenue

Beckhampton Avenue was a curving prehistoric avenue of standing stones in the parish of Avebury, in Wiltshire. It ran broadly southwest from Avebury Henge toward The Longstones at the hamlet of Beckhampton. It probably belongs to the late Neolithic and the opening of the Bronze Age. Only one stone, known as Adam, still stands in the open.

Even in the early eighteenth century there was little of the double line left to see on the surface, and the other stones were broken up or buried.

The ground is chalk country in the upper valley of the River Kennet. Avebury Henge sits on a low ridge about 160 metres above the sea, with the Marlborough Downs to the east, about six miles from Marlborough and seven from Calne. The monuments of this landscape cover several square miles, and the village of Avebury, with Avebury Trusloe and the hamlets of Beckhampton and West Kennett, holds about 480 people in 235 homes. In the Mesolithic the woodland here was alder, lime, elm and oak.

Pollen shows a fall in trees around 4500 BC and a rise in grasses, with the first cereal pollen, between about 4500 and 3200 BC. Farmers opened that woodland into grassland. The soils, already tending toward chalky brown earth, became the open country in which the later stones were set.

That change belongs to the Neolithic British Isles, the farming age that ran from about 4100 BC to about 2500 BC. Before it, people in these islands lived by hunting and gathering, and for a long time Britain was still joined to the continent by the land of Doggerland. Caroline Malone has described the late Mesolithic here as a technological backwater beside farming regions farther south. Around 4000 BC, migrants from central Europe brought crops, herds and new ways of settling.

Communities cleared forest on a scale that permanently changed the islands. Polished stone tools appeared. Nobody knows what language those first farmers spoke, and they left no writing. John Lubbock later gave this age the name Neolithic.

Early in it, people built chambered tombs. Later they turned to stone circles, a habit that ran on into the Bronze Age. The whole span is only about two thousand years, something like eighty to a hundred generations. A stable farming economy, secure enough to feed people who spent seasons moving earth and stone, was in place in Britain by about 4000 to 3500 BC.

On the line of the future avenue, that earlier world had already left a monument. Before the stones were raised, the site held a Neolithic causewayed enclosure. An air photograph of 1997 showed a roughly oval ditch in Longstones field, and geophysical survey had already hinted at buried stones. Excavation in the late summer of 1999 cut the ditch in several places.

It was flat-bottomed, about a metre to a metre and a half deep, and built from short segments or elongated pits. Nothing of a bank survives, but the fills are asymmetric, which suggests that a bank once stood inside the enclosed area. One terminal was found, so there was at least one gap. The ditch could not be traced through the main stone trench, and that gap may have been about eighty metres wide, sitting where the avenue later ran.

The western arc is faint and may have held other breaks. One reading is a large C-shaped enclosure with a single wide entrance.

The finds in that ditch are few, and they fix a sequence. The primary silt produced a single sherd read, provisionally, as Windmill Hill pottery of the earlier Neolithic. At the northern terminal, animal bone lay on the base: a small articulated group of toe bones, a vertebra and a small shoulder blade. Higher up, an intermittent turf line formed.

Compared with experimental earthworks, that line may represent only a few tens of years. Animal bone, including a horn core, lay at the same horizon, and in one cutting about half of a pot was found and read as Grooved Ware, a later Neolithic style. The upper fill is so uniform that the ditch may then have been deliberately backfilled. One account calls the enclosure an earlier Neolithic causewayed enclosure.

Another calls it probably mid-Neolithic, an oval up to 140 metres across, with a shallow semi-segmented ditch and a wide entrance, earlier than the avenue and similar in form to the first phase of Stonehenge. A report from the dig itself describes an oval about 150 metres long and 100 metres wide. The interior was remarkably free of features of the same age. Shards of Neolithic pottery came up with the stones.

Avebury Henge, the monument this avenue leaves, is the largest megalithic stone circle known. It is a bank with an internal ditch, not a fort, and two smaller stone circles stood inside the outer ring. It was not designed in one season. It grew over several hundred years in the third millennium BC, and radiocarbon dates put the earthwork by the middle of that millennium.

The henge is not a true circle. One survey gives a diameter of 347.4 metres and a circumference of over 1,000 metres. Another gives a bank and ditch 1.3 kilometres round, with 180 local, unshaped stones in the outer and inner rings. A third describes an earthwork about 420 metres across, holding a circle of about 100 substantial sarsen stones and two inner circles of about 100 metres each.

Aubrey Burl suggested 3000 BC for the central cove, 2900 BC for the inner circle, 2600 BC for the outer circle and the henge, and about 2400 BC for the avenues. Mike Parker Pearson noted that the stones were added at about the time Silbury Hill, Stonehenge and Durrington Walls were also being built, and he speculated that a religious revival drove that spending of labour.

Harold St George Gray, working for the British Association in 1908, 1909, 1911, 1914 and 1922, showed how the chalk was cut. More than forty antler picks lay on or near the bottom of the ditch. The builders had gone down about 11 metres with red-deer antler, leaving a bank about 9 metres high. Gray recorded a flat base about 4 metres wide, though later archaeologists have questioned the use of untrained labour and the resulting profile.

He found few objects, but scattered human bones, especially jawbones, and at about 2 metres down the skeleton of a woman about 1.5 metres tall. The top of the bank is uneven. Caroline Malone suggested that this followed from gangs working sector by sector. Aaron Watson, Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard have argued that the irregular crest was part of the original design.

Watson also suggested that digging the chalk and raising it into banks was a way of turning the land inside out, a space felt to stand between the world above and the world below.

The purpose of Avebury Henge was never written down. Many archaeologists think it was used for ritual or ceremony. Some suggest seasonal gatherings, with people watching from the bank. A scarcity of pottery and animal bone at the entrances has been read as a sign that the interior was kept apart, a kind of sanctity.

Many of the sarsens had already been used to polish axes, or were heavily worked, before they were brought in. Gray's human bones have been set beside the disarticulated bone of earlier enclosures, and ancestor rites have been proposed, not necessarily instead of other ceremonies. The ditch lies inside the bank, so the earthwork was not a defence. Windmill Hill, an older causewayed enclosure nearby, held so much animal bone that it is thought to have been a place of gathering and feasting for people from well beyond the valley.

West Kennet Long Barrow, Silbury Hill and The Sanctuary stand in the same group. Caroline Malone has treated monuments of this kind, here and at Stonehenge, as ceremonial centres.

Kennet Avenue is the partner line. It leaves the southeastern entrance and runs to The Sanctuary on Overton Hill. It was two parallel rows, about 25 metres wide. One account gives its length as 2.5 kilometres, another as a connection of over 2 kilometres.

Alexander Keiller and Stuart Piggott excavated the northern third in 1934 and 1935 and concluded that about 100 pairs had stood there. Beaker burials under some of the stones were used to date that avenue to about 2200 BC. Stones were pushed over and buried, or smashed for building, between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Twenty-seven stones stand now, and thirty-seven concrete markers show empty places.

Maud Cunnington re-erected one stone there in 1911. Keiller had found a spread of settlement along the avenue in 1934. Joshua Pollard and Mark Gillings returned to it in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and recovered 16,399 pieces of worked flint, from the Mesolithic through to the early Bronze Age. Isobel Smith later wrote up Keiller's work and renumbered the stones.

The same page that describes Kennet Avenue says that Beckhampton Avenue led west from Avebury toward the Beckhampton long barrow, with Adam and Eve still standing west of Avebury Trusloe.

The western avenue is less visible, and the accounts of where it ended do not all agree. It leaves the western entrance of Avebury Henge. William Stukeley drew it as part of a line he believed ran on toward the long barrow, and in his day only about thirty of its stones were left, so the line was harder to follow than Kennet Avenue. The stones found in 1999 sit on that line, and they also align the centre of the henge with Adam and Eve.

Other readings bring the avenue to The Longstones and stop it at the cove, about 1.5 kilometres from the circle. The first 500 metres out of the western entrance can be estimated from Stukeley's notes and from chance finds of buried sarsens, burning pits and empty pits along the village high street. Eve has been read as a stone of that line, leading back toward the western gateway and the high street. Between the high street and the cove, the course was, until very recently, a blank.

The Longstones are the two survivors, close to Beckhampton. Adam is the larger. Its weight has been estimated at 62 tons, and it was one of four stones in a cove, open on the southeastern side toward the South Street barrow about 130 metres away. Eve is smaller and is more likely to have been one of the avenue pairs than a cove stone.

The other cove stones were taken away after the Middle Ages by a local landowner. In 2000, excavators from the universities of Leicester, Newport and Southampton found the sockets of those missing cove stones, set tightly beside Adam. Adam fell in 1911. Maud Cunnington had it put back in 1912, at the direction of the Wiltshire Archaeological Society, and beside it she found a Beaker burial of a middle-aged man.

The two stones were scheduled as an ancient monument in 1933. In the later Middle Ages the three stones of this cove were known as the Devil's Quoits. Stukeley thought the pair he saw belonged to a cove or circle like the cove in the northern inner ring at Avebury, set immediately beside the avenue. He also thought the line ran on past them.

Excavation and geophysics have not confirmed that further stretch. A synthesis of the digging from 1999 to 2003 treats the cove as the western end, and says that the westernmost 150 metres were examined, together with a single stone 335 metres farther east.

The people who lived with these stones were also the people of Bronze Age Britain. That age is reckoned from about 2500 or 2200 BC until about 800 BC, after the Neolithic and before iron. There is no agreed first year. Some put the break at 2000 BC, some at 2200 BC, and the years from 2500 to 2000 are often called both late Neolithic and early Bronze Age.

A copper age is sometimes allowed between the twenty-fifth and the twenty-second centuries BC, and sometimes denied because the metal was still scarce. Around 2500 BC a new pottery, the Bell Beaker, arrived. With it, in the centuries from about 2400 to 2000 BC, came a sharp change in ancestry. About nine tenths of the older gene pool, descended largely from the first farmers, was replaced by people whose ancestry lay with herders of the western steppe, closest to Beaker communities of the lower Rhine.

The Wessex culture became the main early Bronze Age culture of central and southern Britain. Between about 2200 and 2100 BC, Britain was the first part of Europe to take up tin-bronze fully, and the southwest was a source of tin for the continent and the Mediterranean. Great stone monuments went on being built or altered, among them Avebury, Stonehenge and Silbury Hill. Silbury, the largest prehistoric mound in Europe, was raised around 2400 BC to about 39.5 metres, of something like half a million tonnes of chalk.

The Beaker grave beside Adam belongs to this horizon. It is a different burial from the Beaker graves under Kennet Avenue that were used to suggest a date around 2200 BC, and it has not been given a year of its own.

What the avenue was for has to be inferred. Joshua Pollard, who co-directed the 1999 excavation from the University of Wales at Newport, said that part of the purpose must have been to join monuments that were already sacred into one ceremonial complex. He said the discovery meant the whole Avebury complex had to be rethought, because the scale of building in the later Neolithic, from about 3000 to 2200 BC, was greater than had been allowed. He hoped the avenues would show how the monuments shaped movement and the experience of a life.

The pairs do make a path. A person walking them would have been led from the western entrance, along a corridor of stones, to the cove that faced the South Street barrow. The circle at the other end was kept oddly clean of ordinary rubbish. The labour was public and heavy.

Three of the buried avenue stones found in 1999 were estimated at four to six tonnes each, far smaller than Adam, and the henge ditch is a cutting some 11 metres deep, made with antler. Gillings and Pollard have argued that forest, clearing and stone were symbols as well as resources, and that Avebury stood where those three met. Parker Pearson's suggested religious revival, if it is right, would place the avenues in a generation that was also piling chalk at Silbury and resetting Stonehenge. Nothing in the ground records a creed.

The landscape did not stay in the hands of its builders. By the Iron Age, Avebury seems to have been left. Aubrey Burl thought that people then would not have known who had raised it, or when, and might have taken it for the work of an older people or the house of a spirit. In 43 AD the Roman conquest reached southern Britain.

Visitors from Cunetio, Durocornovium and the farms around Devizes came by a new road, and Roman pottery was left in the ditch. After Roman rule failed, Anglo-Saxon settlers came. Within about ten miles, four place names remember Woden. It is not known whether they gave Avebury itself a god.

A sunken-floored hut was built outside the west bank in the sixth century, and the stones were mostly left alone. In the seventh and eighth centuries those communities were turning to Christianity, and in the tenth a church was built just west of the monument. The earliest surviving writing that fixes the monument in a landscape is a charter of King Athelstan in 939, setting the bounds of Overton. In the next century Viking armies fought in the district.

Silbury Hill was fortified, apparently by local people under attack, and Avebury village may have been destroyed.

By the later Middle Ages the country was Christian, and a monument that was plainly not Christian had been given to the Devil in local speech. The great stone at the southern entrance was the Devil's Chair. The stones of the north circle were the Devil's Brand-Irons. The Beckhampton cove was the Devil's Quoits.

Early in the fourteenth century, villagers began to pull the large stones down and bury them in pits dug ready at the side, presumably because the stones were thought to be the Devil's work and against the faith of the village. Burl suggested that a parish priest prompted it, perhaps Thomas Mayn, who served from 1298 to 1319, or John de Hoby, who served from 1319 to 1324. In 1938 Keiller's diggers found a man under a fallen stone of the circle. Coins of about 1320 to 1325 were with him, and a pair of scissors and a lancet, the tools of a travelling barber-surgeon.

He seems to have been killed while digging the pit in which that stone was to be buried, in what has been called a rite of destruction. The death appears to have stopped the felling for a time. People feared it was a punishment, from a spirit or from the Devil, and the story of a man crushed by a stone was still told in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Black Death reached the village in 1349 and almost halved the population.

Survivors had to farm, and they did not have the hands to start the demolition again.

The destruction returned in the later seventeenth century and the eighteenth, perhaps encouraged by Puritan hostility to anything counted pagan. Stones that had stood for thousands of years were smashed for building. The method was to heat the sarsen, shock it with cold water, and break the cracked rock with a sledgehammer. The same fate met the avenue.

Buried stones of the kind found in 1999 were, by analogy with Keiller's work at the circle and on Kennet Avenue, thought to have been toppled and covered in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Burning pits, full of the last of a stone, match a later campaign, from the middle of the seventeenth century into the early nineteenth. A nearly complete clay tobacco pipe in one of those pits suggests that at least that burning was nearer the middle of the seventeenth century than the early eighteenth. William Stukeley watched a burning of this kind in the 1720s.

A later synthesis of the excavated avenue placed the breaking in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and dated the one stone burial that produced dating evidence to somewhere between the early sixteenth century and the late seventeenth. The deepest of the three buried avenue stones had two natural holes, one large enough for an arm. In the second hole were a split cattle bone and fresh flakes, perhaps put there when the stone was raised or while it stood.

William Stukeley was born at Holbeach in Lincolnshire on 7 November 1687 and died on 3 March 1765. He was a physician, an Anglican clergyman and an antiquary, and he did more than anyone of his century to record Stonehenge and Avebury before they were further reduced. He toured every year from 1710 to 1725, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1718, and became the first secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He was ordained in 1729.

Archbishop William Wake, a friend, urged him to use the ancient monuments against deism. From that came his belief that the druids had kept a monotheism inherited from the biblical patriarchs, which he called Patriarchal Christianity, and that they had laid the circles out as serpent temples of the Trinity. He first came to Avebury in 1719, saw the breaking of stones, and between then and 1724 visited six times, sometimes staying two or three weeks at the Catherine Wheel Inn. He drew what he called a British temple and dated the druids' work to 1859 BC.

He took the two inner circles for temples of the moon and the sun. In 1743 he published Abury, and in it the Beckhampton line was the tail of a serpent whose head was The Sanctuary and whose body was the great circle. He was recording scraps. John Aubrey, who had come upon Avebury while hunting in 1649 and had described it to King Charles II in 1663, had not recorded this western avenue at all, though more of it should still have been visible in Aubrey's day.

Aubrey called Avebury a cathedral and Stonehenge a parish church. By the nineteenth century only Adam and Eve were obvious, a mile and a half west of the circle, and it was reasonable to suspect that Stukeley had joined isolated stones to finish a serpent he already believed in. Archaeologists of the later nineteenth century largely dropped his druids. What lasted was the habit of measuring, and the drawing that told a later dig where to start.

Pollard said the avenue would not have been found without those notes.

The test came in Longstones field in the late summer of 1999. Mark Gillings, Glyn Goodrick, Joshua Pollard and David Wheatley directed a team of about fifteen academics and students from the universities of Leicester, Southampton and Wales. Goodrick, of Newcastle, was beside the machine when the bucket struck stone about half a mile southwest of the circle. The sound of the bucket changed.

They stopped, and shovelled out the top of a sarsen. He called it the most exciting thing he had seen in sixteen years, and one of the most significant prehistoric finds of the century in England. Six regularly spaced features matched six stones of the avenue Stukeley had drawn between 1719 and 1724. Three were buried sarsens, two were burning pits, and one was a pit from which a stone had been taken.

Two of the buried stones lay just under the subsoil. The third was fifty or sixty centimetres deeper. Medieval ridge and furrow crossed the trench, and a coin at its base may one day date that ploughing. The avenue, as dug, runs through the eastern entrance of the old enclosure.

For a week the argument that had dogged Stukeley was over. The second avenue was real, and the scale of the complex was larger than the doubters had allowed.

The next season opened the sockets. In 2000 a length of 120 metres was uncovered, a double row with stones at intervals of about 15 metres, the same pattern as Kennet Avenue. The universities of Leicester, Newport and Southampton cleared the cove sockets beside Adam. The avenue may once have been thought to run on past The Longstones.

The digging and the geophysics have not shown that continuation. What they have shown is a western terminal at the cove, and a line of pairs coming into it from the henge.

That middle stretch was read in 2022, without a new trench. Mark Gillings, Paul Cheetham and Jayme Lewis surveyed a paddock at Manor Farm in Avebury Trusloe, a corridor of about 160 by 60 metres at the rough midpoint of the projected line. A resistance survey in 2005, an 80-metre square sampled every metre, had been suggestive and inconclusive, and had even been read as a possible circle. The 2022 work was done in September, in an exceptionally long dry summer, good conditions for finding buried stone.

Fluxgate gradiometry, as on earlier jobs in this landscape, saw a metal pipe, the fence, animal troughs and an old boundary, and saw no megaliths at all. Electrical resistance, ground-penetrating radar, electromagnetic induction and resistance tomography were then combined. They mapped about 120 metres of the avenue: the places of five pairs, potentially six. The anomalies are not the holes the stones originally stood in.

To bury or to burn a stone it first had to be toppled, so the pit sits offset from the socket, like a petal from the centre of a flower. Measuring from the middle of an anomaly, and assuming a stone about 3 metres across, leaves a possible error of about a metre and a half for each stone.

Twelve positions were numbered. Three still hold buried stones, if a doubtful double pit is counted among nine that were broken up. One buried stone is roughly circular, about 2.8 by 3 metres, lying between about 0.7 and 1.1 metres down. Another is a long rectangle, about 1.9 by 4 metres, at about a metre.

A third, tilted down from west to east and about 2 by 2.6 metres, lies between about 1.1 and 1.8 metres, among the deepest burials yet found on this avenue. One large low-resistance anomaly, about 6 metres across, sits where a pair would be expected. It may be a single clean pit in which two stones were broken, a method not otherwise seen on this line, or the avenue may have paused there, as a gap has been argued on Kennet Avenue near its occupation scatter. The longitudinal gap is about twice the usual interval, which is why a missing pair is suspected.

On the excavated part of the avenue, nine stones had been broken and four buried. The new stretch, read the same way, is three buried and nine broken. The intervals match the pairs already known, and they support Burl's view that these avenues were built in straight lengths rather than as one smooth curve. The course here may lie a little north of the line drawn in 2008.

Trenches in the north of Butler's Field in 1983 to 1986, and again in 2018, found no avenue on the old projection, though a watching brief in 1998 had found one isolated buried stone. Projecting the known pieces raises the possibility that Church Walk preserves a kink, turning the line onto the western entrance, much as Kennet Avenue kinks onto the southern entrance. Two gaps remain for survey: about 500 metres of arable and pasture between the paddock and the excavated cove, and about 400 metres east from the paddock to the high street, through a farm, gardens, hedges and paths.

The World Heritage Committee is the body that chooses places for the World Heritage List. It draws representatives from twenty-one states, elected for a term that the governing convention sets at six years, though many states volunteer to serve four. It meets once a year, and its discussions are assisted by three advisory bodies. In 1986, at the tenth session, the paired landscapes of Stonehenge and Avebury were inscribed, and Beckhampton Avenue was named among the Avebury monuments, with Windmill Hill, the West Kennet Long Barrow, The Sanctuary, Silbury Hill, the Kennet Avenue, the West Kennet palisade enclosures and the barrows.

The inscription presents both avenues as lines of parallel stones that still join the great circle to other monuments in the hills. On the ground, the western line has only Adam and Eve above the turf. The listed landscape is chalk downland in which ceremonial and burial monuments were built and used for about two thousand years, from about 3700 to 1600 BC. Each of the two areas covers about 25 square kilometres.

In 2008 the Avebury boundary was extended to East Kennet Long Barrow and to Fyfield Down, with its Bronze Age fields and its natural sarsen stones. Roads still cut the circle and Kennet Avenue, and a road separates The Sanctuary from the barrows on Overton Hill. About a third of the property is owned and managed by conservation bodies. The stones of this avenue had already been scheduled in 1933.

The inscription did not raise them again. It placed the buried pairs, the cove and the circle in one protected landscape, and it left the research open.

What remains is a short row of facts and a long gap. The enclosure came first, a segmented ditch with a wide entrance, already silting when Grooved Ware was in use. The avenue came after, a double file of sarsens at roughly 15-metre intervals, leaving the western entrance, crossing that old entrance, and ending, on the evidence of the digging, at a cove that faced a barrow. A Beaker burial was put beside Adam.

Medieval people buried stones and named the cove for the Devil. Later people burned stones for houses, while William Stukeley drew the scraps and invented a druid serpent that the next century discarded. The 1999 trenches proved the pairs were real. The 2022 survey proved they continue through the middle paddock, mostly as pits and broken sarsen, with a few stones still asleep in the chalk.

The stretches between the high street, the paddock and The Longstones are still unmapped. No sentence from the builders says why a person was meant to walk that line. The scale of the work, the cleanness of the circle, and the way the pairs tie barrow, cove, avenue and henge into one route are the evidence that it mattered.