Stone Circles

We've passed the one year mark of living here in England, but because of pregnancy and life with a newborn, we haven't done a lot of the traveling and touristy things that we want to.  So this weekend we took advantage of the nice weather and drove down to see some of the standing stones we have within a couple hours drive.

First up: Stonehenge!

At the visitor centre there is a large stone on a wood platform and logs.  This is how they speculate the stones were moved when Stonehenge was built. 

After we ate lunch in the café and looked at the exhibit in the visitor centre, we took a shuttle bus (you can also walk) over to the stones.  Yes, they are just a bunch of rocks, but it's so iconic and it's really pretty neat to see.

Surrounding the stones is a mound and a ditch, and around that is the roped off walkway where we could walk all the way around the circle.  (One part actually gets you quite close to the stones, but then you go over the mound and the rest of the time is outside of that.)

We learned that, if you stand right in the centre of the circle, a certain rock marks where the sun sets at Winter Solstice and there's an "arch" opposite through which you can see the sun rise at Summer Solstice.  Apparently on a normal day there are approx. 10,000 visitors to Stonehenge, but people also travel from all over to experience the solstices there.

After a stroll through the gift shop, we headed out, aiming for Avebury, which is basically on the way home from Stonehenge.  This is a much larger stone circle, divided into four sections by roads.  One key difference here is that you can go right up to the stones and run around among them. We stopped for a "snack picnic" under the shade of a large tree, and then headed back down the hill to the stones on our way to the little farm which now serves as a museum and café for the site.  There is also a manor and gardens, but we were too late in the day to fit it in.