Avebury Day Pilgrimage

Avebury Day Circular Pilgrimage – 11 miles, 1 day

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Windmill Hill loop – 7 miles without (purple route on Google Maps)
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Overton Down extension to walk along Ridgeway (green route on Google Maps)A circular day route starting and ending at National Trust Car Park in Avebury, heading first from Avebury to the Sanctuary near East Kennett.
See Google Map waypoint descriptions for more info on each holy place.

Come to connect with the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world, designated as a world heritage site, and turn your visit into a pilgrimage by walking around Avebury’s vast ceremonial complex. This is pilgrimage of the land, of deep prehistory: a pagan pilgrimage. ‘Pagan’ includes Christians and everyone else – pagans, without creed, focus on the earth and land.

For the circular day pilgrimage (i.e. pragmatic for those arriving by car), you start at the car park before walking out south-east parallel to the Ridgeway along an evocative old path through the West Kennett Vale to the 4500-year-old Sanctuary, an ancient gathering place shaped by its circular, labyrinthine timber temple from which the West Kennet Stone Avenue once extended a couple of miles, all the way to Avebury. As you walk the Vale, see if you can spot the ‘lumps and bumps’ on the hill-lines around you (these are the remains of prehistoric tumuli). Given its position at the end of the Ridgeway and the Avenue, the Sanctuary is a kind of portal into the wider Avebury complex. Before you enter the centre, walk round the circle until you reach the entrance. Here you can set your pilgrimage intention for the day, perhaps asking the most important question to which you want an answer.

From the Sanctuary at East Kennet you walk along the chalk river to West Kennet’s almost 5700-year-old Long Barrow, a stone chamber built into a long mound of earth where the child and adult bones of 50 people were once buried up on this ridge to be as prominently visible as possible from all around. Inside, you can hum or sing in this wonderful acoustic, resonating at specific frequencies which can activate the spirits of old. Perhaps you might also light a candle in the central chamber (extinguishing and removing it before you leave).

Leave by walking along the long spine of the Long Barrow to the source of the River Kennet, the Swallowhead Springs, and their watchful guardian trees that arch their branches over the spring and are tied with devotional clouties. Place your hands in the water and perhaps drink it (through a water filter, of course, such as a ‘LifeStraw’ or ‘Grayl’). These springs brim with clear water, particularly around St Bride’s Day on the 1st Feb, a day when people traditionally visit wells and springs. These springs produce so much water that sometimes you can’t get across the large stepping stones.

Next is the largest and most mysterious prehistoric mound in Europe, Silbury Hill, which compares in height and volume to the Egyptian pyramids, originating at the same time, 4400 years ago. 30 metres high and 160 metres wide, its construction is estimated to have involved about 4 million man hours of work. Half a million tonnes of material, mostly chalk, were used to create it. Some would say it is like a pregnant womb or nipple on the earth, an omphalos, but whilst we will never know the whole truth, it is visible for miles around and was clearly important. Yet more mystery!

As you walk up Waden Hill (Woden’s) away from Silbury, pause and look back at its magnificence. Waden Hill has panoramic views at the centre of the Avebury monument complex; e.g. turn NNW towards and view Windmill Hill, a Neolithic causewayed enclosure, and the first monument of the whole Avebury complex, which also sports a couple of round barrows added in the Bronze Age. Then descend to what remains of the West Kennet Stone Avenue. There were originally around 100 pairs of prehistoric standing stones, raised to form a winding snake-like 1.5 mile ritual path. Winding your way between parallel male phallic-shaped and female diamond-shaped stones in a river-like formation aligned with the Winter Solstice, you process, like countless pilgrims before you, towards Avebury’s Great Stone Circle.

The centrepiece of the Avebury complex, the Circle, is in four very large irregularly-delineated quadrants encircled by a colossally deep ditch, with two smaller inner stone circles, and 227 places where stones are or would have been. Over time some were toppled and buried to get them out of the way, and in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, others were burned and smashed, both for profit (e.g. for building and agricultural improvements) and from hatred of it being a pagan monument. What horrors wrought. Of the stones that remain, each have their own unique character, and some weigh around 100 tons.

The Great Stone Circle stands as one of the foremost marvels of prehistoric Britain. You enter through two large portal stones – pause a moment as you cross the threshold to connect with the intention you started your pilgrimage. Touch any of the stones you find, indeed you can even lick them, but the BPT do not recommend this, for health reasons. The stones represent a unique embodiment of our collective heritage (one of the official reasons for it being a World Heritage Site). Through them, we have a connection with ancient ceremonial and mortuary practices – the result of around 2000 years of continuous use and monument building – between c. 3700 and 1600 BC. And it has contemporary cultural reference too: at the eastern end is the triad of root-revealing trees that Tolkien used to sit under, and which inspired the Ents of the Lord of the Rings.

For the optional additional loop, travelling west out of the circle you come across Avebury’s Saxon & Norman St James’ Church before reaching the Adam and Eve stones that once started the ancient Beckhampton Avenue, the alternative snaking processional avenue that approaches Avebury from the south-west. From here, should you have chosen this extra loop, it is one last gentle climb to Windmill Hill, home to a neolithic enclosure that is the Avebury ritual complex’s oldest site. Experience its magical panoramic views at sunset from the Bronze Age round barrows. And subsequently, like the circularity of the Avebury complex, you complete your journey by returning to the stone circle, knowing the place for the first time.

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Avebury Day Linear Pilgrimage: from Alton Priors Springs and Yew Tree – 9.5 miles, 1 day

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Orange route on Google Maps

For the linear 9.5-mile pilgrimage version of the route described above (recommended for those not arriving by car), you can start south at the Broad Well of Alton Priors, one of the sources of the River Avon (go on, get in the water, it’s newly sprung!), and walk through the portal of its nearby 1700-year-old hollow yew tree in the adjacent churchyard. From this combined Pagan and Christian place you then climb Pewsey Downs (accompanied by a view of the White Horse) to Adams Grave Long Barrow, and then along the Ridgeway, past the larger (but inaccessible) East Kennet Long Barrow to join the route above at the Sanctuary.

The text above appeared in our pilgrimage column in the Idler Magazine (published on 1 Nov 2023).

Read article in the Guardian about this route