198 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 
Key rons C 
Swindon Old Church 
Coate Reservoir 
Broome 
Day House Farm NE and SW ) 
Hodson 
Fir Clump, Burderop Wood 
Winterbourne Bassett 1 
Avebury 
Falkner's Circle 
10 Broadstones. Clatford 
11 The Sanctuary 
12 Langdean Bottom 
A Swindon (0) 
B Wanborough 
C Chiseldon 
D Marlborough 
OMmANADMNEWNH 
On, 
©) 
D 
1 ND OR Kennet 
ae 
Fig. 1 Map. The North Wiltshire stone circles 
may call it, to an archdruid dwelling near 
thereabouts, whilst Abury was his cathedral’. 
Almost a hundred years later Sir Richard Colt 
Hoare believed he had re-discovered it. ‘I was 
enabled to find the remains of this ring, which is 
situated in a pasture ground at the angle of a road 
leading to Broad Hinton and consists at present 
only of a few inconsiderable stones’. His map 
showed the scattered stones in the corner of a 
crossroads at SU 094 755, north of the lane between 
Winterbourne Bassett and ‘Cleeve Pipard’ (Clyffe 
Pypard) and east of another to Broad Hinton . 
Having read Hoare, the Rev. Edward Duke in 
1846 offered an early version ofa ley line laid out by 
‘our ingenious ancestors’. He imagined a gigantic 
planetarium composed of seven landscaped 
concentric rings, the outermost 32 miles in 
diameter. At their heads, lying exactly north-south, 
were the prehistoric ‘planets’. At the centre was the 
sun of Silbury Hill. At the south was Saturn, 
Stonehenge. Failing to find any suitable heavenly 
bodies at the north of rings 5, 6 and 7 Duke chose 
Winterbourne Bassett on ring 4, ‘a fair temple of 
stone’, as Venus. That unvisited and long-vanished 
shrine of the goddess of love rouses no enthusiasm 
in ley-liners today. 
Hoare had mistaken the site but his confident 
description misled all his successors. In 1881 the 
Rev A. C. Smith probed the field for missing stones 
‘by means of the crowbar and spade’ and in the 
following year a plan was made by the Rev. W. C. 
Lukis showing the remains of a concentric circle 
whose diameters were 73.2m and 50.3m. Seventy 
years later Alexander and Archie Thom surveyed 
the same stones. Their plan showed an off-centre 
stone, and a plain ring 47.6m across. (Fig. 2) * 
Everyone had accepted Hoare’s irrelevant 
stones but a geophysical survey of the field in 1998 
rejected them. ‘No convincing evidence was 
found’. In the Bodleian Library, Oxford the same 
investigators examined Stukeley’s sketch of 
Winterbourne Bassett. It was entitled ‘a double 
circle of Stones 100 f. diam at Winterburn basset 20 
May 1724 and consisted of an outer ring about 
30.5m across, the largest stone on its south-west arc, 
and an interrupted inner circle. 
Drawn from the ring’s northern side it showed 
Silbury Hill and Avebury’s church in the distance 
with Tan Hill beyond them, places that cannot be 
seen from the traditional site because of rising 
ground. A more likely situation for the destroyed 
10 ° 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 FT 
=i fea] 
Om t 
A:- Buried sfone 375 ft 
A277 hs 0°73 6=4+78 
a B:- Buried stone 427 Fc 
AL=776 he $=+1%0 
C’- Buried stone 544 ft 
A2=89 Ha BHF 
Dia isoFTt 
\p 
wees 
g & | 
T | Z 
| 
OC \ 
2508 h=%t 
6=-10°% 
Su OFarss 
WINTERBOURNE BASSETT 
SU 287 
sig 35/5 
Fig. 2 Plan of the supposed Winterbourne Bassett stone 
circle. Thom, Thom & Burl, 1980, 132, S5/5. 
