Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine, vol. 95 (2002), pp. 249-58 



Excavations at the Beckhampton Enclosure, 

 Avenue and Cove, Avebury: an interim report 

 on the 2000 season 



by Mark Gillings 1 , Joshua Pollard 2 and David Wheatley 3 



Following the discovery in 1999 of an unsuspected Neolithic enclosure and the line of the putative 

 Beckhampton Avenue, excavations undertaken in 2000 sought to investigate these features further and also 

 shed light upon William Stukeley's so-called Beckhampton 'Cove '. Using a combination of surviving features 

 and local accounts of recent stone destruction episodes, Stukeley had suggested that an open box-like 

 setting of huge sarsen stones (similar in form to the cove within the northern inner circle of Avebury) had 

 stood mid-way along the length of the Beckhampton Avenue. Excavations confirmed not only the existence 

 of the Cove, but have served to shed important light upon the precise form and phasing of this monumental 

 feature. 



BACKGROUND TO THE 

 PROJECT AND THE 1999 

 EXCAVATIONS 



Excavations undertaken in 1999 at Beckhampton, 

 to the west of Avebury, Wiltshire, led to the discovery 

 of the remains of a second megalithic avenue leading 

 from the western entrance of the henge monument, 

 and an unusual late Neolithic earthwork enclosure. 

 The existence of this second avenue (the so-called 

 Beckhampton Avenue) had been mooted by the 

 18th-century antiquary William Stukeley (Stukeley 

 1743), though severe doubts about its existence had 

 subsequently been raised. Excavation revealed a 

 total of six stone settings along the line of the 

 Avenue. These were defined by buried stones and 

 post-medieval stone destruction pits, together with 

 original stone sockets. First spotted from the air in 

 1997, the enclosure is oval and up to 140m across. 

 Consisting of a shallow, semi-segmented ditch 

 broken by a wide eastern entrance, it pre-dates the 

 avenue (Gillings et al. 2000a; 2000b). 



THE 2000 EXCAVATIONS 



Further excavations were undertaken over a four 

 week period during late July and August 2000. The 

 principal aims of the 2000 season were threefold: 

 to investigate more of the later Neolithic enclosure 

 identified and sampled during 1999; to establish 

 the course and character of the Beckhampton 

 Avenue as it continued to the south-west of the area 

 investigated in 1 999; and to ground-truth Stukeley's 

 observations of the Beckhampton 'Cove', a setting 

 of three massive sarsens midway along the course 

 of his Avenue, of which one solitary stone ('Adam') 

 remains. The work was also directed towards 

 recovering additional environmental and 

 chronological detail that would place the monument 

 complex within a broader regional framework of 

 Neolithic developments (cf. Whittle 1993). As with 

 the 1999 excavations, the work was guided by a 

 detailed pre-excavation geophysical survey 

 undertaken by the Ancient Monuments Laboratory 

 of English Heritage. 



1 School of Archaeological Studies, University of Leicester, Leicester, LEI 7RH 2 Dept. of Humanities & Science (Archaeology), 

 University of Wales College Newport, PO Box 179, Newport, NP18 3YG 3 Dept. of Archaeology, University of Southampton, 

 Southampton, SO 17 1BJ 



