328 Abttry. 



The Avenues and Sanctuary. 

 We now proceed to the avenues, each of which was composed of 

 200 stones, and was of a sinuous course, and about a mile and a half 

 in length. The head of the serpent, (which reptile the whole work 

 was supposed by Stukeley to have been designed to represent,) 

 rested on Overton or Kennet Hill, and the tail extended from 

 Abury in the direction of Beckhampton. The head was called the 

 " Sanctuary," and was composed of two concentric ovals, the outer 

 containing 40, the inner 18 stones.^ The diameter of the outer 

 oval, according to Stukeley, was 138 feet 4 inches by 155 feet 6 

 inches. That of the inner one was 44 feet 11 inches by 51 feet 10| 

 inches. Of these circles, as he found them in 1723, Stukeley gives an 

 engraving.^ They stood in what is still called Mill Field, and their 

 sites are shown in Nos. 20, 21, and 29 of Stukeley's illustrations. 

 Farmer Green took away the stones and Farmer Griffin ploughed 

 up the ground, in 1724. " The loss of this work," says Stukeley,^ 

 " I did not lament alone ; but all the neighbours (except the person 

 that gain'd the little dirty profit) were heartily griev'd for it. It 

 had a beauty that touch'd them far beyond those much greater 

 circles in Abury town. The stones here were not large, set pretty 

 close together, the proportions of them with the intervals, and the 

 proportions between the two circles, all being taken at one view 



' " It can hardly now be thought that the number was really 19, as some have 

 supposed, e.<7. the Rev. E. Duke, ' Druidical Temples of Wiltshire,' p. 64, 178. 

 Several megalithic circles in Cornwall are of 19 stones, also the inner oval at 

 Stonehenge, as is thought ; and each side of the avenue at Classerness ; in all of 

 which the number 19 is with some reason believed to refer to the Metonic Cycle." 

 — [Dr. Thurnam.] 



^ For Aubrey's account of these circles on Overton Hill, see above p. 317, and 

 for his plan of them, see plate 3, fig. 1. He makes the diameter of the outer 

 circle 45 paces, of the inner 16; the outer circle to consist of 22 stones, the 

 inner of 15. There are no traces on his plan of the circular trench around it, 

 which he mentions in his description. The mode in M^hich the avenue narrowed 

 and bent at its junction with the outer circle, as shown by him, is very ciu-ious, 

 and favours the notion of a dracontine form. 



3 It is difficult to discover the extent of Stukeley's acquaintance with the 

 ' Monumenta Britannica.' With reference to the 'Sanctuary,' he writes as if 

 he had not seen more than the short account published in Gibson's edition of 

 Camden's ' Britannia;' while it is clear from pages 33-and 45 of his " Abui-y," 

 that he must have known more of the MS. than is there printed. 



