Tag Archives for Avebury replicas

More Avebury–And We Thought There Were None!

AveburyModelWHM2 3

photos by Pete Glastonbury, with permission

Hello again from the amazing Wiltshire Heritage Museum in Devizes. Of course we’re not actually there, but we have a rich fantasy life! Today, thanks to our regular supplier of Afghani-grade Avebury photos, we have two Avebury models to post. Avebury is a very large stone circle in Wiltshire England. We hope you already knew that.

The model above is to be applauded for accuracy and detail. It shows the circle as it might have been in its heyday, with circles and avenues leading from the circle complete. Very nice. We would like it better without the labels, but we understand that in a museum, the point is to communicate knowledge and the labels serve that purpose.  8 druids for this one.

AveburyModelWHM 3And then there’s this one, depicting, as it might have been at its height, the entire Avebury region, or nearly so, as it excludes Windmill Hill and, of course, all the ancient crop circles. It includes various barrows, the serpentine avenues (which we discussed here), Silbury Hill, West Kennet Long Barrow, and if you look closely enough there may be a tiny model of Pete Glastonbury walking around taking pictures (or if there isn’t perhaps there should be). This, too, is an extraordinary piece of work, and we award it 8½ druids. We like to see the whole landscape represented!

The Wiltshire Heritage Museum is said to house numerous models of Stonehenge seen nowhere else, the amazing Celtic Cabinet, and, for now, Clonehenge’s favourite exhibition, Inspired by Stonehenge, which includes “a variety of objects, graphics, music and moving images including postcards and guidebooks, clothing, paperweights and snow globes, jigsaw puzzles, horse brasses, toasting forks and even a stamp from the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan that shows Disney characters Mickey Mouse and Pluto at Stonehenge. There is also a quantity of souvenir china – some more attractive than others. Once visitors have viewed the exhibition they can vote for the item they consider to be in the worst possible taste!” Bold emphasis added by us. People, does it get any better than that?!

Hours and admission fees for the museum can be seen here. Oh, and the site says “Youngsters are encouraged to be ‘Inspired by Stonehenge’, and are invited to send in photographs of their own Stonehenge models for display in the Museum over the summer.” We plan to lean on the museum a little in autumn, to get them to let us post the best–and perhaps the worst–ones they get. And you haven’t seen the last of Wiltshire Heritage Museum on this blog. More in a few days!

Thinking of Avebury Replicas

aveburytable

Table once owned by Roger Bolton, photo by Pete Glastonbury— a model of Avebury as it is thought to have looked at its height

Time out from our mission here to look at Avebury replicas. There aren’t many, but they do exist. We have made a point so far of avoiding lintel-less stone circles unless there is something else special and Stonehenge-like about them. There are probably as many modern stone circles as there are Stonehenge replicas, and we had to draw the line somewhere.

Avebury, however, is a special case for several reasons, including physical closeness and probable other connections to Stonehenge as well as the  fact that at 427 meters in diameter it is the largest stone circle in the world.  Yet few replicas exist.

avebury-google-earth[Avebury on Google Earth] Although a great many of its stones are now missing, Avebury is one of the wonders of the British countryside and likely part of a ritual complex that included a megalithic avenue leading to it, Silbury Hill, the West Kennet Long Barrow, and other less well known but fascinating features. It, too, is a henge and roughly contemporary with Stonehenge, which is nearby, although Avebury’s stones probably went up first.

avebury-cots21[One of 2 Avebury models from the DVD The Children of the Stones] Somehow Avebury never acquired the cache Stonehenge has. Yet a few small replicas do exist, and this evening we present two, courtesy of Mr. P. Glastonbury, megarak and photographer extraordinaire. We won’t score them. To see more photos of Avebury itself and some high dynamic range panoramas of it and other places, visit Pete Glastonbury’s site. I suppose next we’ll have people making mounds of dirt and sending us pictures of Silbury Hill replicas. Even the aliens who make crop circles agree–there’s something about Wiltshire!

Share