United States or Samoa ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"I do," Sir Richmond countered. The doctor thought for a moment or so. "You are committed to the project of visiting Avebury?" he said. "They ought to see Avebury," said Sir Richmond. "H'm," said the doctor, ostentatiously amused by his thoughts and staring at the fire. "Birth Control! I NEVER did." Sir Richmond smiled down on the top of the doctor's head and said nothing.
Along the brow of this long ridge wanders that fascinating old track indifferently termed Ridgeway and Icknield Way, which only leaves the highlands to cross the Thames at Streatley. But we are off our own track now and must return to Avebury, or Abury as the natives have it.
It is no wonder that the Indians still retain such ideas when, as Lord Avebury says: "We do not now, most of us, believe that animals have souls, and yet probably the majority of mankind from Buddha to Wesley and Kingsley have done so."
Those at Avebury vary in height from about fourteen to sixteen feet, and in the Deccan is a tumulus surrounded by fifty-six blocks of granite of an even greater size. This extremely heavy block rests on supports rising more than thirty-nine feet from the ground. Stone as well as wood can be much more easily cut in one direction than in any other.
A straight avenue is said to have run from these in a north-westerly direction. Whether these three monuments near Avebury have any connection with one another and, if so, what this connection is, is unknown. There are many other circles in England, but we have only space to mention briefly some of the more important.
Lord Avebury reproduces an Eskimo drawing, or picture-message, in his "Prehistoric Times," to which it would be difficult to find a parallel in Magdalenian remains. I do not mean that the art is superior, but the complex life represented on the picture-message, and the intelligence with which it is represented, are beyond anything that we know of Palaeolithic man.
Though the blue clay in the Vale of Evesham is so tenacious, it works beautifully after a few sharp frosts, splitting up into laminations that form a splendidly mouldy seed bed, so that frost has been eloquently called "God's plough." Various explanations have been given, and one by Lord Avebury is the nearest approach to a correct solution which I have seen, though not, I think, quite accurate.
Avebury had at one time within a great rampart and a fosse, which is still forty feet deep, a large circle of rough unhewn stones, and within this two circles each containing a smaller concentric circle. Two avenues of stones led to the two entrances to the space surrounded by the fosse.
The uncertainty is even greater in the case of temples supposed to be oriented by some star, for in this case there is almost always a choice of two or more bright stars, giving the most divergent results. Avebury and the Kennet Avenue. Its area is five times as great as that of St. Peter's in Rome, and a quarter of a million people could stand within it.
Thus, for example, he says with regard to Avebury, "I feel it will come eventually to be acknowledged that those who fell in Arthur's twelfth and greatest battle were buried in the ring at Avebury, and that those who survived raised these stones and the mound of Silbury in the vain hope that they would convey to their latest posterity the memory of their prowess."
Word Of The Day