Going South (1) Avebury Vs. Stonehenge

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.

At Home

"In the early 1870s, the London and South-Western Railway announced plans to run a line right through the heart of the Stonehenge site. When people complained, a railway official countered that Stonehenge was 'entirely out of repair, and not the slightest use to anyone'".

Slightly pompous, dry and sarcastic in a very English way (though by birth an American), occasionally falling too much under the spell of his own research yet always able to give good anecdote... At Home is pretty much everything you'd expect from Bill Bryson. It purports to take a tour round the author's home, a 19th century rectory in rural Norfolk, using each room as a springboard for a 'history of domestic life'. Of course, being Bryson it soon rambles way off message, to the point where certain chapters manage to get by almost without ever mentioning the room they're supposed to be focused on. (The quote above comes from the chapter on 'The Attic' - don't ask me why.)

So 'The Nursery' deals at length with infant and adult mortality in days gone by and doesn't tell us anything about where cots came from or who first came up with those nursery-rhyme playing mobiles people use to distract babies to sleep. On the other hand, we do get the life story of the man who invented the mousetrap (James Henry Atkinson) in the chapter on 'The Study' - because that's where Bryson fights his own battles with vermin. A typical Bryson anecdote follows, telling how smart rats steal eggs from a poultry market without breaking them...

"...one rat would embrace an egg with all four legs, then roll over onto its back. A second rat would then drag the first rat by its tail to their burrow, where they could share their prize in peace."

Occasionally Bryson becomes so wrapped up in the life of a particular architect, designer or historical figure that he might well be writing their biography, but mostly he boils these characters down to their most fascinating and amusing traits. It's always dangerous skipping a Bryson paragraph, even the boring ones, because you might miss a gem.

Some rooms give him far more to write about than others, particularly the kitchen, bathroom and bedroom... which proves most revealing on how the prudish Victorians dealt with sexual arousal. Who doesn't want to find out more about that?

"A sample of Ice Cream sold in London in 1881... was found to contain human hair, cat hair, insects, cotton fibres and several other insalubrious constituents"

"'Wash your hands often, your feet seldom and your head never' was a common English proverb."

"...the Penile Pricking Ring... was slipped over the penis at bedtime and was lined with metal prongs that bit into any penis that impiously swelled beyond a very small range of permissible deviation."

There. That'll keep my blog blocked on certain search engines for "sexual material". Gotta maintain my sordid reputation...