8/11 (Tuesday) – Avebury

We left Bath to overcast weather for the drive to catch a late afternoon ferry in Portsmouth for the Isle of Wight. 

Along the way we stumbled across one of the fabled white horses carved into the chalk hillsides.  Upon our return home we did a bit of research and it turns out the horse we saw was the Cherhill, or Oldbury, White Horse.  It is the second oldest of the white horses, carved out of the hillside in 1780.

On the way we stopped at Avebury, the only village in the world situated inside a Neolithic stone circle. 

Many of the stone are now gone but the ditch and enough stones remain to get a good sense of the size of the site.  The site dates back to about 2500BC and originally had three concentric circles. 

We walked about half of the larger circle, much of it in a sheep field so we had to watch carefully where we walked.

The one pub in town, another Red Lion, boasted of being the only pub in the world inside a stone circle.

The Red Lion Pub

The next stop was at the edge of the village for a tour of the Avebury Manor, a 16^th century manor house, with a nearby dove cote and the surrounding garden. 

Dove Cote

For many years after being donated to the National Trust the  manor's rooms were empty.  However, in 2011 the manor was the subject of a BBC special, The Manor Reborn.  As part of the special, a number of the rooms where refurbished and furnished, each in a different period of the building’s history.  So there was a dining room from the Tudor period.

 Another dining room, this time from the Queen Ann period.

And the sitting room and billiard room from the 1950’s. 

Unlike most museums visitors were invited to sit on the furniture or play a game of billiards.

The kitchen is Edwardian (early 1900's before World War I).

There were Victorian Kitchen gardens with all kinds of veggies and fruit trees mixed with masses of flowers.

Of course, there were also the regular formal gardens and beds with masses of flowers.

There was a particularly colorful garden surrounded by beautiful old stone walls.

There was also a topiary garden and various clipped hedges defining other gardens.

After finishing with the gardens we made a very brief stop at the village church, the Church of St. James.

Just outside of Avebury was Silbury Hill, the largest man-made mound or barrow in Europe (comparable in height and volume to the Egyptian pyramids).  It was completed about 2400 BC.  No access is allowed in order to preserve the delicate nature of the archeological area.

We arrive in Portsmouth early but they had room on the ferry so we got an early ride to the Isle of Wight.  The ferry ride was 40 minutes to Cowes and from there we had a half hour drive to our hotel on the beach in Shanklin.

(Comedy moment from this morning when our host, Patrick, found out we were headed to the Isle of Wight and cracked a joke.  Question – What is brown, smelly and comes from Cowes?  Answer – the Isle of Wight Ferry [except it wasn’t really brown or smelly].)