The Stones of Avebury
Avebury is not one circle but several, laid inside an earthwork so large that a village grew up in it without filling it. This is what each part is, and how much of what stands today was put back in the 1930s.
The bank and the ditch — 347 metres across, cut 11 metres into the chalk
The henge is the earthwork, not the stones. Its bank encloses a circle about 347 metres in diameter and over a kilometre round. Inside the bank runs a ditch that was cut roughly eleven metres down into solid chalk and left about four metres wide at the base.
That was done with antler picks and shoulder-blade shovels. Harold St George Gray's excavations between 1908 and 1922 recovered more than forty antler picks from the ditch floor. The bank stood something like nine metres above the old ground surface, so the original drop from crest to ditch bottom was roughly twenty metres.
The outer circle — about 100 sarsens, 331 metres wide
Set just inside the ditch is the outer circle: the largest stone circle in Britain, originally somewhere around a hundred sarsen blocks on a ring about 331 metres across. The stones run between 3.6 and 4.2 metres tall and the heaviest exceed forty tons.
They are unshaped. Nobody dressed them, squared them or cut joints into them, which is the plainest difference from Stonehenge thirty kilometres south, and the reason an Avebury stone circle tour can put you within arm's reach of them. Sarsen is a hard silicified sandstone left scattered across the downs, and the builders used the blocks broadly as they found them.
The northern inner circle and the Cove
Inside the outer ring sit two smaller circles. The northern one measures about 98 metres across, and only a couple of its stones still stand upright.
At its centre stood the Cove: three enormous stones set in a three-sided box open to the north-east. Two survive. They are among the largest stones on the site and standing between them is the closest Avebury comes to an interior.
The southern inner circle and the Obelisk
The southern circle was about 108 metres in diameter before the eighteenth-century destruction took most of it. At its centre stood a single monolith about 5.5 metres high, recorded by William Stukeley and known since as the Obelisk.
It is gone. Its position is marked in the turf, which is the first hint of a pattern that runs through the whole site: a great deal of what you are looking at is a marker for something that is not there. How that came about is the story on the history of Avebury.
The Barber Surgeon Stone, and the coins of 1320–25
In 1938 Alexander Keiller's team lifted a fallen stone in the south-west quadrant and found a skeleton beneath it. With the body were a pair of iron scissors, a lancet and coins dated to 1320–25.
The reading is straightforward: a medieval man helping to topple and bury the stone was caught when it came down. The tools suggested a barber-surgeon, and the stone has carried the name since. It stands in the south-west quadrant today, re-erected.
The concrete markers, and why some of them are not stones
Squat concrete plinths sit in the turf all round the circle. They are not stones and they are not ancient. Keiller's excavators set one wherever they found the socket of a stone that had been destroyed or buried, so the plan of the monument could be read again.
Once you know that, the site changes. The complete-looking arcs are partly a 1930s reconstruction, the gaps are real losses, and the concrete is an honest record of both. No interpretation board at the site puts it as bluntly as that, and it is the single most useful thing a guide will tell you.
West Kennet Avenue — the paired stones running south-east
From the henge's south-eastern entrance, West Kennet Avenue runs in pairs of stones towards The Sanctuary on Overton Hill, roughly two and a half kilometres away. The stones alternate between tall and narrow and short and broad, in pairs facing each other.
Keiller excavated and part-restored the northern stretch in 1934 and 1935, re-erecting what he found and marking what he could not. Walking out along it is free, takes twenty minutes, and almost nobody on a coach day does it.
Beckhampton Avenue, and what is left of it
A second avenue ran west from the henge towards Beckhampton. Stukeley recorded it in the 1720s and it was largely disbelieved for two centuries, until excavation in the 1990s confirmed he had been right.
Two stones of it survive above ground, known as the Longstones. There is no restored walk to follow, so this one is a matter of knowing what the field held rather than seeing it.
How much of what you see is original
| What you are looking at | Status | How to tell |
|---|---|---|
| Standing sarsen, weathered and lichened on all faces | Original, never fell | By 1939 only nine were still up |
| Standing sarsen with a clean, unweathered base | Re-erected by Keiller, 1937–39 | The buried face weathered differently |
| Recumbent stone lying in the turf | Fallen, left where it lies | Ten were recorded fallen in 1939 |
| Squat concrete plinth | Marker — the stone is gone | Rectangular, low, obviously modern |
| An unbroken gap | Unexcavated or unrecorded | Nothing marks it at all |
Where to start walking, quadrant by quadrant
Two roads cross the henge and divide it into four unequal quadrants. The south-west holds the Barber Surgeon Stone and the best-restored stretch of the outer circle, and it is the one to walk first if you only have an hour. The north-east holds the surviving Cove stones.
The north-west is the quietest and gives the clearest sense of the bank as an earthwork; the south-east is where the Avenue leaves. Walking the bank itself, rather than the field, is the way to understand the scale — the Avebury map sets out a route that takes in all four, and the visiting page covers what it costs to park. Every guided day listed on Avebury Tours stops inside this circle; they differ only in how long they stay.
Want someone to point all this out?
A guide will tell you which stones are Keiller's and which never moved. Compare the guided days on how long they actually stop.
Sources
Checked on 5 September 2026. Hours and prices are the operators' and the National Trust's own, and they change — the official pages are the place to confirm before you travel.