June 30 - Part 2

In between driving all over the Wiltshire countryside we stopped off at Avebury - the village inside a stone circle - or henge to give it the correct name.

In the background, right from when we saw the first horse at Westbury, all we could hear in the morning was small arms fire, rifle fire and the occasional F1-11 flying over because Salisbury Plain, at the southern side of where we were, is all Ministry of Defence land and they were having exercises or training and generally making a lot of noise. Right until we got to the last horse, near Devizes, in the afternoon they had changed to artillery fire, and on one of the roads there were roadsigns for tank crossings!

Avebury is a lovely little village, and we managed to walk around the entire stone circle, and photographed pretty nearly every stone! My sister, like myself, is an imaginative soul and we were seeing all sorts of different things in the stones, but our two favourite are the beagle and the cat.


There are dozens of other stones, one of which reminded me of a character out of Star Wars and another that looked like an alien in a Dr Who episode.

Like I said, wild imagation!

We actually passed through Avebury a few times - first was immediately after seeing Silbury Hill, which unfortunately they don't allow public access to any more because of erosion, and we missed the sign for the carpark, then again later in the afternoon when we were headed up to the Broadtown and Hackpen white horses and then back through a third time to get to the Roundway horse.

It was on the way between the Westbury horse and Cherhill that we saw our first crop circle - quite by sheer happenstance. I was busily looking out the right side of the car, my sister who was driving caught something out the corner of her eye so we screamed to a halt (literally) in the next layby and walked back and there was a crop circle in a wheat field not 50 yards away from us. If there had been a high point nearby we would have gone there to look down on it but sadly there wasn't. In the photo you can see faint markings where the edge of the circle is.

However, we did see a small plane flying around all afternoon in most of the places we visited, possibly taking photos of the crop circles - of which we caught glimpses of many! We did kick ourselves that we could have seen the one at Alston Barnes if we'd walked across the road from where we'd parked to look at some prehistoric earthworks and up the hill and we would be looking down on it. Still, I'm satisfied that I've seen crop circles now - I can cross that off my bucket list!

Here's Silbury Hill.