This past Beltane and eclipse weekend I went on a solo trip to the ancient stone circle and sacred landscape of Avebury and the gorgeous witchy town of Glastonbury.

I have wanted to go on a solo Avebury pilgrimage for a while. I have visited in groups and with my family, but I really wanted some solo hippy time to just connect in and feel the vibes. I’m someone that needs a lot of alone time to really feel into stuff, and that’s a lot harder to do when you have the performance anxiety of leading a group or the I’m-with-my-dad-right-now self consciousness stoping you from being your full hippy self. 

I am also taking a class on dragons and Avebury magic right now, and I wanted to go and see if I could feel into the stuff the class is talking about. 

So I decided for Beltane weekend 2022, I would go on a little adventure and spend the Saturday night over in Avebury and arrive in Glastonbury for two nights on the Sunday. This meant that I would miss pretty much all the Beltane celebrations in Glastonbury (the town makes a big thing of it every year!) but I was cool with it because it would be far too peopley for me so soon after the Pandemic. Maybe next year. 

What Is Avebury?

Avebury is the biggest stone circle and megalithic complex in the world. It’s a ceremonial landscape that is kilometres across and includes the huge Avebury stone circle, the processional stone avenue, West Kennet Long Barrow, Windmill Hill (which I haven’t been to yet) and Silbury Hill, the biggest man made mound in the UK. 

We don’t know a lot about it’s origins or what it was made for. Many spiritual folk believe it was a kind of ancient earth temple, and folks who are into ley lines feel that Avebury, like Glastonbury, is a powerful meeting point of important energy currents in the earth. 

Visiting the Ancestors at West Kennet Long-barrow

I arrived in Avebury and headed straight for the West Kennet Long-Barrow. This is the oldest part of the Avebury complex and is over 6000 years old! 

The West Kennet Long-barrow is long raised mound on the hill side built by the folks of the Early Neolithic times (4000-2500BC) with a chambered stone tomb at the easternmost side, made of huge slabs of rock.

Long Barrows are a particular kind of ancient neolithic tomb that we have in the UK that takes the form of a mound of earth – often folk would be buried inside it. 

The West Kennet Long-barrow is one of the biggest we have – it is big enough for folks to stand up tall inside it, which is unusual for long-barrows, and the chambered tomb goes 12 metres into the mound. Once upon a time, the sides of the tomb would have gleamed in the sunlight from their bare chalk cladding, much like the restored neolithic tomb at Newgrange in Ireland.

The tomb was used for 1000 years as a burial place and (probably) as a sacred place to connect with the ancestors. It’s for this reason that the paganism historian Ronald Hutton likes to refer to these tombs as tomb-shrines. 

After this 1000 years or so, the tomb was sealed shut – long before any of the other earthworks were created in the Avebury complex.

It’s only in the last 50 years that we have discovered, unearthed and restored the chambered tomb to its neolithic state. 

It’s the first place I visited on my Avebury pilgrimage! I love this tomb – it’s also my mum’s favourite place in this landscape too, if you know about my secretly witchy mum from my email newsletter! 

It’s a really easy sacred site to get to as well – you just park up for free in the lay-by at the road and walk the path. 

After I walked up the path to the long barrow (past a faerie tree!) I sat in the sun at the entrance and meditated to connect with the ancestors and tune in to the legacy of all the people who have lived and loved in these landscapes for millennia, the people who lived in harmony with the earth and who, at one point, worshipped and worked with the land as Goddess. 

I needed a moment to arrive after my long journey, and in the sun at the Barrow seemed to be the perfect place. 

I lay on the earth and performed a rite of dedication to my spiritual work, offering a drop of my most precious jasmine sambac oil as a gift for the green lands. 

And after everyone had gone (the Longbarrow is open to the public, it’s a popular dog walking spot and especially on Beltane we had visitors coming to see the barrow, to drum and sing offerings into the tomb) I went into the tomb itself. 

People had left many flowers haphazardly in the main chamber as gifts to the ancestors – my part as an Aphrodite lady was to arrange them beautifully as a flower altar. 

I was reminded of when I took our first cohort of Morgan le Fay Mystery School students here four years ago after visiting Stone Henge at sunrise – we all took incense into the tomb and prayed one at a time, and then sprawled out on the lawn infant of the entrance and had a big nap. It was such a magical moment!

Silbury Hill

Silbury Hill is like our UK version of the Pyramids – it’s the biggest man-made mountain in Europe standing at at 39.3 metres (129 ft) high. 

We don’t know what it was made for – some folks think there might be the remains of a processional spiral pathway that lead up the hill – but we know that it was a perfectly circular mound, probably surrounded by a moat or tiny lake, and it would have taken millions of man hours to create. 

It’s thought that it was made between 2400-2300BC (long after the Long Barrow was sealed) and that its sides would have been made of shining chalk.

You can’t walk on this hill – the excavations from folk trying to figure out what it is have left it a little unstable and they’ve been busy trying to fix that – so there is a viewing place across the once-upon-a-time moat where you can get a good view. 

I’d never been to the viewing platform before – I was glad that I made the effort this time!

I had arrived, I’d shed the stress of driving and rooted and centred in the earth. I was ready for the stones!

Avebury Stone Circle. 

I arrived quite late and had forgotten that in the countryside everything all the pubs seem to be stop serving food by 8pm (!) so after a little walk around the stones I had to leave earlier than intended to find dinner…. but I came back the next day to spend more time at Avebury!

It was so beautiful to be able to pad around the stones alone. Avebury is this big, lush green field surrounded by a circular henge (a bank of earth and a deep ditch) – it’s just green and glorious.

There are actually three stone circles here – the big one that traces the circular pattern of the henge and would once upon a time have had 100 standing stones, and two smaller ones that would have had 27-30 stones each – and that’s just inside the henge. Avebury has a huge 2.3km long processional walkway between the henge circle and another little stone circle called The Sanctuary, and this walkway was lined with another 200 huge standing stones. 

Stones upon stones upon stones. 

Today, only a small fraction of the stones remain standing. 

Many of the stones were toppled or broken apart over the last 500 years, sometimes motivated by fears of the devil being present in the stones, sometimes simply by the fact that there was all this handy building material just waiting to be chiselled up and used to build homes.  

In 1643, all 200 of the stones in the processional walkway were intact – by the 1930’s only 4 stones were left standing. 

The circles now are a restored Avebury, and a lot of work has been done over the past century to restore the circle, right toppled stones and place markers where the missing stones would have been. 

On my second day I began to really feel into the energy of Avebury. 

It’s like the giant henge that surrounds the stones creates a giant hug that encloses and envelops you inside. It’s such a big green heart-energy place, an enclosed loving temenos, a gentle womb space. 

The energy here is so different to the very famous Stonehenge that is an hour down the road. Here at Avebury there are no guards, no walkways, no ticketed entrances (you just pay for parking), and Avebury isn’t so bombarded by the endless coach loads of tourists here to snap a selfie and move on. 

Avebury is just a vast stone circle with a village inside it. There’s a pub, two little new age shops, a church that sells scones and cakes at the weekends, and some beautiful 200-400 year old buildings (… probably featuring with the broken up stones from the circle.)

You can wander around, touch all the stones, walk up all the henges, and just immerse yourself here. It’s great.  

I walked round the whole circle, and sat with the stones and received the vibes from the land. 

There were pagans there performing a Beltane ceremony! And I saw people in capes walking through the night before, clearly up to some ceremonial shenanigans, and every person I overheard was talking about earth energy or connecting with their spiritual path or the nature beliefs of the people who lived here… I just love that these sites and monuments bring out the spiritual pagan part of so many people. I love being reminded that there are so many more of us than we realise. 

There is a museum here that holds a lot of the find from the Avebury site, but I didn’t go – I thought I’d leave that for next time. I like to have the spaciousness of knowing I will come back to a special place – there is less pressure to squeeze everything out of it this one time. 

One thing I am trying to do on my priestess adventures is to RECEIVE. 

I am opening to this idea that these sacred points in the land don’t require me to DO anything to receive the energy or healing or connection – I just need to show up. 

This is a big shift for me as I often get the opportunity to go on these amazing adventures only to feel like I should be doing more when I am there – connecting more, having a more spiritual experience, making the most of this chance to be somewhere special…

…which usually takes me totally out of the moment, and makes me unable to get into presence to receive whatever there is to receive there. I know, totally counterproductive. 

I know it’s a part of this big scarcity wounding of not-enough I am untangling this year, as the stories that showed up when I was here were a lot of the usual scarcity beasties – you should have got here earlier so you had more time, you should go the shops/why are you wasting your time at the shops?!, you have to go do this now because when will you have the chance etc. 

A lot of my scarcity beasties tend to revolve around time management, as I am generally a slightly disorganised person who resists schedules and timekeeping and feels a like a bit of an ashamed misfit in a very clock-centred world. 

I often feel like as someone who is a public priestess I somehow have to prove my priestessiness to myself at these places and my ego trips me up with it’s scarcity wounding that I’m not enough, and that if I was a real priestess I would be having *insert mind blowing trippy experience here* rather than just generally enjoying myself. 

I know it’s not real, and that it’s all ego nonsense, and on this trip in particular I felt myself really watching and witnessing that part of myself that was trapped in scarcity and lack. It was interesting really SEEING that pattern and how it takes me out of the moment – it was a big theme for me that eclipse weekend. 

So I was wandering around Avebury, connecting with the stones, generally enjoying myself, and watching this part of me doing it’s not-enough chant, catching myself when it tried to take over and returning to being the witness. 

Watching it is the first step. The spiritual path is a commitment to seeing this stuff and being willing to move through it. We aren’t meant to be perfect evolved beings as priestesses – we are just meant to be doing the work to grow and shift through our stories and our ego. There is always more growing to do. 

Priestesses aren’t “better” than regular people – they just keep doing the never-ending spiritual work. 

After my day in Avebury, I drove down to Glastonbury (through the roundabout hell that is Devizes)  to start the second part of my pilgrimage adventure….

…I’ll tell you about that in my next post!

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