Avebury WHS NMP

As part of the National Mapping Programme this project was initiated to examine the area surrounding the current World Heritage Site (WHS) at Avebury to provide English Heritage and the National Trust with information on which to base its assessment and management of the area.

The Avebury World Heritage Site encloses an area of 22km square around the village of Avebury and includes 345 archaeological sites, 68 Scheduled Ancient Monuments (SAMs) and five Guardianship sites: Avebury Neolithic Henge and stone circle with the associated West Kennet and Beckhampton Avenues, the West Kennet Long Barrow, Windmill Hill, and The Sancturary and Silbury Hill. The survey area extended west and south of the WHS comprising nine complete 1:10,000 scale quarter sheets.

The area around Avebury has long been noted for the intensity of Prehistoric sites, especially those of a ritual nature. Many still survive as earthworks, but the cropmark traces of numerous sites levelled through ploughing are still being discovered through aerial reconnaissance in and around Avebury.

The survey recorded a total of 1492 sites, 380 with no previous record in the NMR, which equates to approximately 1.7 new sites per kilometre. The majority of the new records were of Medieval and Post Medieval ridge and furrow and water meadows, types of features that had not previously been recorded.

The survey recorded several Prehistoric sites discovered through the RCHME’s programme of aerial reconnaissance. These sites included a possible Neolithic enclosure within the henge at Avebury (Bewley et al. 1996) and a potential Neolithic long barrow at Lockeridge.

At Beckhampton, west of Avebury, a previously unidentified oval enclosure was photographed in 1997 by the RCHME. The enclosure ditch passed between the Long Stones, two Neolithic standing stones. The enclosure was verified through later geophysical survey carried out by the English Heritage Ancient Monuments Laboratory, but initial excavations failed to locate the ditch. However, a larger excavation of the whole site revealed not only the enclosure ditch, but the parallel settings and buried remains of several stones from the ‘lost’ and much disputed Beckhampton Avenue recorded by Stukeley. The Long Stones are the two remaining stones of one of the alignments.

The survey also led to the discovery of further features associated with a complex of Late Neolithic palisaded enclosures at West Kennet. These were first recorded in the 1950s by J K St Joseph on aerial photographs, though they were not recognised for what they were until 1987, The complex was excavated by Alasdair Whittle of Cardiff University between 1987 and 1992 and the results published by him in Sacred Mound, Holy Rings (1997).

The site plan of these excavations was based largely on the RCHME transcription of the known cropmarks (RCHME 1992). Subsequent to that work there have been further major discoveries associated with this Neolithic complex made from photographs taken by English Heritage in 2000 including a pit or timber circle, a formally defined entrance into one of the enclosures, a further enclosure and an associated palisade ditch (Barber et al 2003).

The images used on this page are copyright English Heritage unless specified otherwise. For further details of any photographs or other images and for copies of these, or the plans and reports related to the project please contact the NMR English Heritage's public archive.

For further information on a project or any other aspect of the work of the Aerial Survey team please contact us at: AerialSurvey@english-heritage.org.uk.