Britain: Coming (almost) full circle

This week a `new' prehistoric creation was discovered near Bristol. But there is much more to see along the road at Avebury. Though our predecessors left barely a standing stone unturned, reports Simon Calder, what remains is still magnificent.

Here's a spooky thing. The grand megalithic shambles known as Avebury is guarded by a triangle of white horses hewn from the chalk of the Wiltshire Downs. Each is three miles distant as the pterodactyl flies. I reckon that the centre of gravity of this triangle (located, since you ask, at the point where the bisectors of the three angles meet) is the car park of the Red Lion. The truly remarkable phenomenon is that the pub stands in the middle of England's greatest Stone Age site. Absurd.

Absurd. When you wander through the pocks of prehistory around England's West Country, that word keeps recurring. Take Stonehenge, the awesomely austere circle that finds itself pincered like a prehistoric walnut between the A303 and the A344. Next Monday morning, the Culture Secretary Chris Smith visits Stonehenge to try to crack the old chestnut of how woefully Britain neglects its ancient history. While he is in that part of the world, he could usefully head north across the pretend Cold War battlefield that is Salisbury Plain and call in at the monumental prehistoric collation at Avebury - which contains at least three of the wonders of Stone Age Britain, yet is constantly overlooked at the expense of smaller, sharper Stonehenge.

Now another wayward sibling has returned to the fold, with the discovery seven miles south of Bristol of a 400ft prehistoric prototype for the Millennium Dome. Its discovery is a miracle of magnetometry, but ultimately the site is an exercise in virtual archaeology. For the real thing, start at the Red Lion.

And to get there, you must take the absurd A361. While it swaggers across Wiltshire from Devizes to Swindon, it cuts clean through the middle of a huge henge (this term denotes a rampart of earth surrounding a moat; if you think about it, an unlikely arrangement for the purposes of defence, so there must have been a more cerebral cause for its construction). The visitor who pauses at the Red Lion will reel at the sight of the largest stone circle in Europe.

Or, at least, the remains of it. Carving initials in a standing stone at Stonehenge is not quite in the same league as the desecration that has been wrought upon the monoliths that are ranged around a three-quarter- mile circumference. The survivors are magnificent: tall, lean shafts of ragged stone exploding from grass chewed smooth by a platoon of sheep, interspersed with plumper, dumpier slabs of rock that bulge in several competing directions at once. Each weighs perhaps 20, 40, even 60 tons. The tragedy is that so few remain.

No barbed wire separates the visitor from the stones; tourism is not the culprit. Originally the circle comprised a congregation of 98, which survived for about four millennia until the meddlesome Middle Ages. Many of the stones were toppled in the name of God; others fell in a frenzy of recycling, when18th-century speculators devised a way to turn prehistoric paganism into profit.

First dig a pit, adjacent to your chosen victim. Fill it with sticks and straw. Get the brawniest locals to topple the stone into its grave. Start a fire beneath it, then batter with sledgehammers. Best of all, alternately heat and cool it. Then haul off the material to build cottages.

Which is why, like a set of pre-NHS teeth, the ring is full of stumpy little gaps (or gappy little stumps). The man we have to thank for there being anything much left on show is a marmalade magnate.

Alexander Keiller used much of his family fortune to become involved in a more profound (and in many ways much stickier) form of preservation than jam. In the philistine 1930s, he was appalled at the way so significant a site could be abused. So he bought up the whole village, and demolished some of the cottages in order to preserve the continuity of the circle. Tablets mourning missing monoliths were placed where once they had stood.

A fine museum, bearing our marmalade man's name, occupies an outbuilding belonging to the expansive Avebury Manor. The museum is not large, and does not seem to be haunted, but it has a permanent resident. Charlie, or Charlotte, is a three- or four-year-old child who died thousands of years ago. (S)he was found ceremoniously and lovingly interred, as if merely sleeping.

West Kennet Avenue sounds like a road on a housing estate on the fringes of Swindon. It is, in fact, an ancient way that wends unsteadily against the contours to the south, staccato stones marking its course with an appropriate approximation.

After a mile it loses the battle with the A4, a much greater west road. But hop across the fence and you can ascend, through fields of winter crops bruised and battered by November, to a thunderously large tomb.

Linford Christie could sprint along the top of the West Kennet Long Barrow in 10 seconds. It resembles a Nissen hut that has been buried beneath layers of turf for greater invisibility, but is another megalithic curiosity - a burial place as intricate, in its own way, as the pyramids. One big difference was that the remains of the chosen few were shuffled around every so often. Ancestor worship seems to have been genuinely a moveable feast. You can enter the first few chambers and wonder at the brave Britons who built it.

Looking northwest from West Kennet, you just wonder.

What possessed a people scraping a living from these downs to create an additional hill, sticking out like a sore tomb from the gentle rolls of Wiltshire. No one knows quite the purpose of Silbury Hill, and several excavations have failed to find many clues.

All that can be deduced is that the construction relied upon a highly sophisticated technique of internal walls (was this Britain's entry for the world pyramid championships, 2000BC?) and that the builders began in August - entrapped Stone Age ants give that away, since their wings sprouted only in summer.

A track spirals to the top, but is these days closed to visitors. Twenty years ago, when Silbury Hill was part of the mandatory mystical warm-up for the Glastonbury Festival, I scampered the 130 feet to the summit. The sense of wonder increases with altitude, as you gaze upon the waves of Wiltshire galloping off towards those sentinel white horses.

Absurd.

By car, Avebury is located just north of the A4 between Calne and Marlborough.

By public transport, the nearest sensible railway station is Swindon. From the nearby Swindon bus station, Thamesdown bus number 49 operates from Swindon approximately hourly during the day. The journey takes about half an hour and costs pounds 1.30 each way. On Sundays, the journey is covered by Wilts & Dorset service number 6.

The Alexander Keiller Museum (01672 539250) opens 10am-4pm daily. Admission is pounds 1.50 (free to members of English Heritage and National Trust).

The Red Lion serves excellent food between noon and 2pm daily.