84 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 
The sarsens on Fyfield Down, many of which have been moved in the creation of prehistoric fields, have a curious ambiguity of 
patterning, blurring the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. © Fon Cannon 2003 
lacked them (pp. 44 and 49). And if they were 
natural, opinion differed as to whether they were 
connected to the bedrock or lay loose on the surface. 
Sir Christopher Wren, discussing them with John 
Aubrey, suggested that ‘they were cast up by a 
volcano’ (Aubrey 1685, 44); for William Stukeley, 
writing in 1740, they were ‘loose, detach’d from any 
rock, and doubtless lay there ever since the 
creation, being solid parts thrown out to the surface 
of the fluid globe, when its rotation was first 
impress’d’ (Stukeley 1740, 16). Samuel Pepys, 
however, found it ‘prodigious’: 
to see how full the Downes are of great stones; and all 
along the vallies, stones of considerable bigness, most 
of them growing certainly out of the ground so thick 
as to cover the ground (Pepys 1668). 
In 1754 the geologist Edward Owen, reserving his 
own judgement on the origins of the stones, noted: 
When I spoke with the People of the place 
concerning the singularity of such large masses of 
stone lying in so particular a manner, they gave it me 
as their opinion that they took their rise in the 
different places where I saw them lie, and the tops of 
numbers of them, just shooting as it were healthy and 
strong out of the earth, as if they belonged to large 
masses growing up within it, seemed to confirm them 
in that opinion; but be that as it will, the oldest and 
most sensible part of the people assured me, it was 
their stedfast belief, that they had grown very 
considerably in their time (Owen 1754, 241). 
But it was John Aubrey, writing between 1665 
and 1697, and William Stukeley, published from 
1740, who made the first systematic investigations 
of the landscape, establishing that the sarsens were 
natural and the source material for Avebury and 
Stonehenge, and for the first time proving the 
difference between these man-made monuments 
and the natural phenomenon of the sarsen spreads. 
It is worth remembering that the contrast between 
the different parts of the landcape was not nearly as 
great in their time as it is today. Most of the stones 
at Avebury were buried or recumbent, and the size 
and shape of the henge greatly obscured by 
orchards and field boundaries. There were also 
larger numbers of uncleared natural sarsens in the 
area than there are now (Field, forthcoming); and 
on Fyfield Down, along the Kennet Avenue and in 
