Avebury - take 2
We visited Avebury again today. It really is a fantastic place. Once again we were blessed with lovely weather and fairly low numbers of other visitors.
They were giving guided tours of the stone circles and the manor so we went on both. We’d arrived too late to see the house last time, but it seems this was just as well. When there was a tenant living there you could hardly see any of the rooms, but now they’ve moved out you get to see lots of rooms. It’s not what I expected. It’s much older and more higgledy piggledy.
According to the circle tour guide a lot of the stones were broken up in the seventeenth century to build the village, but many of the other missing stones were buried in the 1300s because they offended the church. Seems like thet did us a favour for a change - otherwise the village would probably be bigger. In the 1930s an amateur archaeologist set about reinstating the stones and they even found a mediaeval skeleton under one of them. Look like they were crushed when pulling them down.
We then had a pint in a lovely thatched pub just outside Avebury on the road to Silbury Hill, before heading back to Devizes.
In the evening we had a nice meal in The Crown, a Wadwoth pub just a few yards from the brewery. We’re planning a tour of the brewery in the morning.