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THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZEME 



monument like Avebury. This said, the enclosure 

 might well have embodied subtly different meanings 

 and values from those found in earlier monuments 

 to which it made reference. Activity at Windmill Hill, 

 close to the north, was seemingly bound up with 

 ideas of community (real and idealised), gathering 

 and participation, with feasting, deposition and a host 

 of other activities taking place (Whittle et al. 1 999) . 

 There is little sense of this at the Beckhampton 

 enclosure, its diminutive size and the absence of 

 subsequent elaboration perhaps even reflecting 

 difficulties in mobilising participation in the project. 



The Avenue and Cove 



Nearly 200m of the Avenue have now been 

 investigated, providing a wealth of information on 

 both its original form and its later history of 

 piecemeal destruction. Unfortunately, there is still 

 no secure dating evidence from the sockets; though 

 we would envisage a sequence that sees the Avenue 

 following the enclosure, with the levelling of the 

 latter (around 2500-2300 cal BC) happening at a 

 point when the megalithic settings were erected. 

 The relationship of the Avenue to the enclosure 

 represents something of a paradox: its siting was 

 deliberately intended to take in the enclosure, but 

 required the levelling of the earlier monument as 

 part of the process. It is tempting to see this as an 

 overtly ideological act, removing the enclosure and 

 confining it to (a particular kind of) memory. 



The full course of the Avenue remains to be 

 established, particularly beyond the Cove. It is 

 significant that no further Avenue stones were 

 detected to the south-west of the Cove in Trench 

 24, assuming that the longitudinal interval between 

 stone pairs remained constant, implying that 

 something unexpected is happening at this point. 

 Whilst the Cove could represent the end of the 

 Avenue, further pairs of stones were recorded by 

 Stukeley running to the south-west, at least as far 

 as the present Beckhampton roundabout (Stukeley 

 1 743), and a sarsen burial pit was excavated on this 

 line at the side of the Calne road by the Vatchers in 

 the early 1970s (information from Alexander Keiller 

 Museum, Avebury). Assuming this westerly stretch 

 does exist, and given the 'broken' interval and a 

 slight change in alignment, it could very well be a 

 later addition. The idea of phasing/stages to the 

 Avenue's construction, with the original terminal 

 immediately to the south-west of the enclosure, is 

 given support by the sequence and arrangement of 

 stone settings around the Cove. 



The excavation of the Cove vindicates Stukeley's 

 observations regarding the format of the setting, 

 though it is clear that his southern-most stone 

 (represented by socket F.87) was not as he thought 

 part of the southern line of the Avenue, but in fact 

 set within its centre. This shows that the Cove was 

 not an open-box arrangement of three stones, as 

 appears to be the case with the supposedly 

 analogous setting within the Northern Inner Circle 

 at Avebury (Smith 1965), but a 'closed' rectilinear 

 setting, still reasonably permeable, widening to the 

 south-east. 



This was evidently not a single-phase setting. 

 Two stone holes were unexpectedly revealed to the 

 northwest and southeast of the Cove - the 'Beacock 

 Holes' F.54 and 83. These held stones apparently 

 removed soon after their setting; they were not 

 subject to later burial or breakage like the others, 

 and the sockets were carefully backfilled with clean 

 chalk rubble. Judging by the size of the sockets these 

 must have held substantial megaliths, perhaps in 

 the order of 3-4m high. The working hypothesis is 

 that they, along with the stone in F.87 (which lies 

 at the mid-point on a line between the two), formed 

 a first phase setting, 40m across, forming the 

 original terminal of the Avenue (Figure 8) . When 

 the Avenue was extended to the south-west the two 

 outlying stones were removed, and the Cove created 

 on a slightly different alignment, utilising the 

 existing (and very substantial) megalith in F.87. The 

 dimensions of this complex are revealing. The 40m 

 span of the first phase setting is equivalent to that 

 of the outer stone circle of the Sanctuary at the end 

 of the corresponding West Kennet Avenue (Pollard 

 1992). The elements of the Cove itself are seemingly 

 set out in units equivalent to c.2.5 and 5m (though 

 given the bulky nature of the stones, none of these 

 measurements can have been retained with any 

 precision during construction) - thus the width of 

 the setting ranges from c.7.5-10m, and its length is 

 just over 15m. The geometric regularity of the 

 setting again recalls that of the Sanctuary and many 

 other major late Neolithic timber and stone 

 monuments (cf. Powell 1994). 



Burl (2000, 31-3) has suggested that this and 

 other coves were intermediary megalithic forms 

 between earlier Neolithic chambered tombs and 

 later stone circles, in as much as they mimic the 

 closed format of simple megalithic chambers. The 

 apparent late date of that at Beckhampton takes it 

 out of such an evolutionary sequence, though the 

 location of the setting within close proximity to two 

 earthen long mounds lends support to Burl's 



