James Tucker in Cov

Just before I went back to Canada, I stayed with relatives in Andover, who have put me up there several times when I'm in the south of England. The day before I was to leave, my cousin Laura drove me and Laura (no relation) to Avebury, an ancient stone site relatively near to Stonehenge, and dating from (quite roughly) about the same time. The site at Avebury is a lot more extensive than Stonhenge, though not as spectacular. It's a huge area enclosed by a hand-dug ditch, inside of which are two circles formed by large standing stones. The whole thing was built thousands of years ago, and a surprising amount is still intact.
In the meantime, however, a perfectly normal little village has grown up in the middle of all of this, consisting of a dozen or so houses, a church and a couple of pubs. The roads in and out of the enclosure use the gaps created thousands of years ago, and the two roads follow the same tracks that have always been there. The ditch and rampart are handy for keeping in the sheep that graze all around the village, and occassionally eat moss off of the standing stones.
Just outside the village (down an old ceremonial route lined with rocks) is a huge artificial hill- Silbury hill. It's basically a pyramid made out of chalk, and covered with earth, and though not much to look at, gets pretty boggling once you realise the work put into it- it's 130 feet high and the largest of its kind in Europe. Unlike a lot of similar structures, it doesn't seem to have anyone buried in it.
Basically across the street is the West Kennet Long Barrow, which was used to bury people- around 50, at minimum. It's 100 meters or so long, but the 'open' area that was used as a tomb is much, much smaller. It's apparently older than Stonehenge, and was in use for thousands of years. For whatever reason, the texture of the rocks inside the tomb looked really artificial, like those you see in a museum exhibit about cavemen. Apparently, the museums are doing a decent job after all.