148 
NATURE NOTES 
coolness. It is easy in the sultry summer months to understand 
and appreciate Jefferies’ praises of the downs, and see why he 
urges all to spend what hours they can in breathing the bracing 
and exhilarating air. 
The whereabouts of Avebury needs to be explained, for it is 
not an easy place to find, and it is not known like many other 
places, more famous but not more interesting. The traveller 
along the great Bath road passes close to it between 
Marlborough and Caine. It lies a little distance off to the 
northward ; no railway line is near, and no station within seven 
miles or so. Two roads lead from the main road, one branching 
off at West Kennett and the other by the Beckhampton training 
stables, and from Avebury there is another route to Swindon. 
Close alongside the Bath road rises the great artificial mound of 
Silbury Hill, the use and purpose whereof no man seems able 
to understand ; but the origin of it is manifestly to be placed far 
back in early days, before the history of these parts began to be 
written. 
In Avebury itself, this greater edition of Stonehenge, it is not 
the great stones alone that attract and rivet the attention. 
Rather it is the great rampart that surrounds the whole. The 
stones that still remain are neither so many in number nor so 
prominent in position as to strike the eye most forcibly. Of the 
original number comparatively few are left, and they are 
scattered about, some standing like sentinels in a field, others 
fallen flat upon the ground, while some are to be found in a 
farm, against a wall, or in a hedgerow. For former owners of 
the property and inhabitants of the village have not scrupled to 
appropriate to their own use these remnants of antiquity, and 
break them up for material to build their own houses, barns and 
walls. Let us hope that such acts of vandalism will never be 
repeated in Avebury. The greater part of the little village lies 
inside the rampart, and the best view of the great circle is to be 
obtained by mounting to the top where the road enters. The 
great mound is still unbroken for some three-fourths of its 
original extent, except where the roads pierce it, but the majority 
of the stones still existing are to be found to the northward of 
the great enclosure. The village lies in the middle. Outside, a 
long row of stones stretches as far as the main road at West 
Kennett, and a few more stand erect and solitary at some 
distance from the road to Beckhampton. 
It is a wonderful survival of a forgotten and unrecorded past. 
What was this place? No one can give a satisfactory answer. 
Those stones were set up before our history began to be written, 
and by men like those who, in another part of the same county, 
set up the better known, but not more magnificent, Stonehenge. 
Why they set them up, and what they did there, we cannot say. 
That they were for some religious purpose is most probable, for 
nothing tends to show that they were for any purpose of defence. 
Camps and fortifications on other parts of the downs are evident 
