We were heading for Dorset, but our first stop was in Wiltshire at the huge prehistoric henge monument that dominates and defines the village of Avebury. It includes one of the largest stone circles in the world, well over 1000 feet in diameter, built over a period of a thousand years by 40 generations of Neolithic Britons. Long before the Parthenon, the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China were even rough sketches on a slate, the ancient Aveburians were heaving stones so big you'd struggle to lift them with a JCB today across vast distances to create this strange monument to the unknown.
Nobody knows why they did it or what it was for, it all happened so very long ago that no written record exists; we can only guess at its purpose or significance. Later residents would demolish and dispose of much of the monument, believing it to be the work of the devil, but fortunately large sections were saved and re-erected in the 1930s by a dedicated archaeologist named Alexander Keiller. The Avebury museum is dedicated to Keiller and his work and features a collection of Stone Age relics such as axeheads, flints and - most impressive of all - calcified dog excrement, proving both that man's best friend was a loyal companion even five millennia ago, and that white dog shit wasn't purely a phenomenon of the 1970s.
The best thing about Avebury is the open access for everyone. You can walk the ancient circles and lay hands on the monolithic stones, getting a real sense of the history and mysticism of the place. Sheep graze amid the henge itself and it's all refreshingly uncommercialised. You can't help but be dwarfed by the scale of the place - in size and age. Avebury made me feel like a gnat flitting about the vast forest of history. But it also made me feel connected to something larger and older, as though its ancient architects were reaching out and communicating to me across the years. My life would be just as unimaginable to them as theirs is to me. There's something oddly reassuring about that.
By contrast, Avebury's far more famous yet smaller and younger cousin left me cold. Perhaps I'd been spoiled earlier in the day, but everything about Stonehenge proved a disappointment. From its featureless moorland location on the junction of two busy A-roads to the armies of tourists queuing up for the expensive luxury of a guided tour around its outer border, this iconic symbol of the British Isles might well have been a polystyrene film set. I wondered how many of those visitors would drive away commenting that it didn't look like it does on the telly or that it really was nothing more than a huge pile of carefully arranged rocks. There was no magic to be felt here, Stonehenge couldn't ever live up to its own legend.
