Avebury is the place where a village grew up inside a stone circle. The henge, a huge circular bank and ditch enclosing the largest stone circle in Britain, was built around four and a half thousand years ago, and the village, with its church, its manor house and its pub, sits partly within it, with a road running right through the middle. You can walk among the stones, touch them, sit beside them, and watch the sheep grazing around them, which is a very different experience from the controlled visits at Stonehenge, its more famous partner on the World Heritage list.
The monuments around Avebury form one of the richest prehistoric landscapes in Europe. Silbury Hill, the largest man-made mound in prehistoric Europe, rises beside the A4, a grassy cone whose purpose remains a mystery. West Kennet Long Barrow, a chambered tomb older than the stone circle, lies on a ridge to the south and can be reached by a short walk. The Kennet Avenue, a double line of standing stones, runs from the circle towards another site on Overton Hill, where the ancient trackway known as the Ridgeway begins its long journey across southern England.
Many of the stones you see today were reerected in the 1930s by Alexander Keiller, an archaeologist and heir to a marmalade fortune, who bought much of the village and excavated the site. Others had been toppled and buried in the Middle Ages, possibly as a result of the church's disapproval, or broken up for building stone. The museum in the village tells the story.
The riding here is through the rolling chalk downs of Wiltshire, with long, open roads, wide views and gentle bends. The roads can be busy, especially the A4 and the main roads around Marlborough and Swindon, and the narrow lanes through the downs are often used by tractors and horse riders. The weather can be windy and exposed on the high ground. Marlborough, about nine kilometres away, is a handsome market town with a wide high street, fuel, shops and cafes. Avebury village has a cafe and shops run by the National Trust, which looks after the site, and the stones are at their most atmospheric early in the morning or at sunset, when the crowds have gone.