Less than an hour north of Stonehenge lies the village of Avebury, the site of yet another great stone henge, however this one is both larger and more ancient than its more popular cousin, Stonehenge. Another plus to visiting the henge at Avebury is how close you can get to the stones. Rather than being cordoned off by ropes, you can actually walk up and touch the massive rocks.  Some of them are formed in humorous shapes, either from damage inflicted by humans or the wearing away of time. 

The drive from Stonehenge to Avebury is lovely, zooming across windswept plains and winding through forests dark and deep. Access to the Avebury Stone Circle is free, as it circles the village itself in three cocentric rings. At the hands of superstitious locals, the site suffered much destruction over the years, and the stones that remain owe much to the preservation work done by Alexander Keiller, and amateur archaeologist who excavated and re-erected many of the stones in the 1930s. A museum in the village tells the history of the site and illustrates what it looked like at the height of its influence. It is believed to be some sort of religious center, and though the stones themselves are smaller than those at Stonehenge, the circles themselves are far wider. 

Other interesting Neolithic sites sit nearby, including the Ritual Procession Way, a trail of stones leading away from the Avebury Stone Circles. The West Kennet Long Barrow is a 300 ft chambered tomb mound, the biggest in England. It was built as a communal cemetery around 3250 BC, and is the best-preserved Stone Age chamber tomb in the UK. It lines up with the rising sun on summer solstice. Silbury Hill sits adjacent to the Long Barrow. It is Erupoe’s largest prehistoric, man-made, earthwork, but despite extensive excavations its purpose remains a mystery. The 5 acre hill is dotted with grazing sheep, a seeming natural anomaly on the flat plain surrounding Avebury. 

Driving west from Avebury, we passed by the Cherhill Horse, a white horse carved into the chalk hillside. It is not a genuine prehistoric white horse—there is only one of those in England at Uffington—but instead an 18^th century creation. Above it are the remains of an Iron Age hill fort known as Oldbury Castle. An obelisk, the Landsdowne Monument, was erected on a rise nearby in 1845 by the Marquis of Lansdowne to honor his ancestor, Sir William Petty.