West Kennet Long Barrow

Wiltshire Landscape (watercolour on paper 120cm x 40cm)

Perhaps the most important part of any journey is planning the route ahead, and arranging where to stay beforehand. On this occasion, we failed to adhere to this simple rule, and arrived at Avebury right in the middle of a crop-circle convention. Hippies from all over the country had gathered to beat bongos and hug standing stones, and there was no room in any of the hotels or guest houses for miles around, so we ended up spending the night in a farmhouse near Marlborough. The next morning, we returned to Avebury, and stopped off at the West Kennet Long Barrow, an enormous tomb more than 300ft. long which had been in use for centuries and probably contained the bones of the ruling elite who ordered the building of Silbury Hill in the distance. This hill would have expended millions of man-hours, and may well have taken nearly fifty years to build. It certainly is a strange landscape, made even stranger by the fact that we know next to nothing about the culture which settled here and imposed their stamp on the environment.

And as we stood there awe-struck at these ancient feats of engineering, light aircraft were buzzing around in the deep blue sky, giving crop-circle conventioneers a bird’s-eye view of patterns in the fields below.