The high point of our circle-hunting expedition came near the end of our visit to England. We were staying in a 17th century thatched cottage just outside Marlborough, only a few miles from the great stone circle of Avebury (here’s a photo of the cottage, included not because of any possible Neolithic origins but mainly because it was just so lovely):
We made sure to include a visit to the Avebury stone circle complex because it has become our favorite pilgrimage destination, in large part because it allows direct access to the stones (unlike Stonehenge, where you can only touch them on the Solstices). This photo shows that Avebury is a place where sheep may safely graze:
The individual stones aren’t as big as in Stonehenge, and they’re not as evenly hewn or balanced and aligned. It’s the size of the overall complex itself which is most mind-blowing, as the aerial photos below will show. So we spent some time with the stones, not just being agog, but also doing some semi-objective measurements using dowsing rods and a magnetometer. No signals registered on the meter, probably because I used a fairly inexpensive and not-very-sensitive hand-held device. But we had better luck with dowsing, even though I’m a rank amateur, with the rods clearly reacting when I got within 30 feet of the stones (it’s easier to see the rods splaying out in the close-up photo on the right).
After this informal attempt at research, we went for a walk around the perimeter of the complex. We followed the ridge (aka henge) that surrounds the stones and was built up from a ditch dug around the site’s ¾ mile-long circumference.
Our walk began along the line of stones at the bottom of this picture and headed counter-clockwise up across the street to rejoin the ridge path. This path looks like a white line – that’s because of the chalky terrain under the grass, a geologic continuation of the White Cliffs of Dover. When we got to the road leading back into the village (at about one o’clock in the photo), we took a sharp left and headed to the pub in the village center. That may sound a little strange, but the 17th century village of Abury (how it was originally spelled) was actually built inside the pre-existing 4500-year-old Neolithic circle – the world’s largest – because many of the stones were broken up and repurposed by the villagers to make their homes and church. And that’s another unique feature of Avebury – there’s certainly no Red Lion Inn inside Stonehenge!
So it was a lovely mid-afternoon walk around one of our favorite spots in England. Normally that would have made for a very satisfying day, but things got a lot more interesting that evening when I checked the website that gives updates on new formations. I saw that an entry had just been posted a few hours earlier – around 5pm – showing that a new formation was lying just outside the Avebury henge. And as you can see from this aerial view (taken from a lower angle than the first overhead image and rotated ½ turn counter-clockwise), the new formation appeared at the exact spot where we went off the white path and headed home!
The website gave no information about when, exactly, the circle was first sighted or when it might have been created. But it was undoubtedly posted on the same day as our walk, as there is a steady flow of tourists walking along the henge path who would surely have noticed the circles. So it looks like we just missed – we were on the wrong side of the ridge at just about the right time, but for some reason we turned left instead of continuing onward another 20 feet or so. If our intuition had been more attuned, we might have enjoyed a close-up view of a crop circle in the process of being created! And to top it off, that day – July 14 – was my birthday. What a present that would’ve been – my best ever, in fact, even better than the bicycle I got when I turned 10. 🙂
That sort of coordinated appearance of a circle wouldn’t be unprecedented – here’s one well-documented example of human intention directly influencing the formation of a circle. In 1999, a group of Japanese researchers spent an evening in group meditation, wishing for a circle to appear that reflected a Japanese cultural theme. The next morning, outside their hotel, was an origami pattern in the field:
It certainly seemed as though circle-making could be a cooperative project. So perhaps it’s not unreasonable to imagine a circular birthday present manifesting for a researcher who had spent the previous six months planning for his visit to Wiltshire and hoping against all odds ….
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