Avebury In Winter: A Photographic Essay

AVEBURY in Winter A PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY MICHAEL ALLEN 1 Copyright © Michael Allen 2004 First published in 2004 by Kingsfield Publications www.kingsfieldpublications.co.uk ISBN 1 903988 09 8 2 CONTENTS How to View This Book..............4 Introduction...............................6 Sketch Map...............................12 Photographs..............................13 Technical Notes........................33 3 HOW TO VIEW THIS BOOK This ebook is available only in PDF format. So, if you are reading these words on screen, you must be using a version of the Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you are not already familiar with the Reader, please consult the Help file to find out how to navigate around this document. The book is designed to be viewed at a magnification of 100% or a little more. Theoretically, the book should open automatically at that magnification, but if it has not done so then you should click on the toolbar button which provides an ‘actual size’ view. If you wish, you can try using the ‘fit in window’ button, which may enlarge the picture somewhat. The third option, using the ‘fit width’ button, will normally provide an even bigger magnification, but you may notice a deterioration in the quality of the pictures. The main purpose of the photographs in this book is to give readers an impression of the grandeur of the Avebury 4 stone circle. But you won’t be seeing the pictures at their best unless your monitor is correctly adjusted. Take a look at the 21-step wedge below. It runs from pure black on the left to pure white on the right. You should be able to see a small but clear difference between each step on the way. (For the purpose of this exercise, it will help if you increase the magnification of the Adobe Acrobat Reader to 400%.) If you can’t distinguish between some of the steps, you should adjust the brightness control on your monitor. If that still doesn’t do the trick, some excellent advice on monitor adjustment can be found on the Northlight Images Gallery. For those who are interested in the technical aspects of photography, information on how the images were prepared for this book can be found on page 33. 5 INTRODUCTION Avebury in Winter is primarily a collection of black and white photographs; these can be found from page 13 onwards. In a sense, the photographs tell their own story, but a few facts and figures will nevertheless be useful in setting the scene. Avebury is a small village in the county of Wiltshire, England, and it is the site of an impressive prehistoric monument – a monument which is sometimes said to be the greatest of its kind in the world. The principal feature of the Avebury site is a circle of standing stones. These stones were erected some 4,500 years ago; they are less famous than the constructions at Stonehenge, which lie some 17 miles to the south, but they are often considered to be more memorable. From an archaeological point of view, Avebury is important enough to have been declared a World Heritage Site. The original designers and builders of Avebury created 6 a massive circular ditch, some 30 feet deep and about 400 yards in diameter. This ditch was dug with nothing more than picks made from red-deer antlers and shovels formed from the shoulder blades of oxen. The earth removed from the ditch was thrown up on the outside of the circle to form a surrounding mound, which again was some 30 feet high. The area enclosed by this ditch and mound is about 28 acres. The sheer size of the Avebury earthwork is perhaps its most striking feature, and there is no one point from which the whole of it may be surveyed. Immediately inside the ditch, the builders erected a circle of about 100 huge stones, a few yards apart. Some of these sarsens, as they are called, weigh forty tons each; they were tran