Thursday: It was sunny today, but a bit chilly. I managed to have a little trip outside Westbury for the first time in months. Me and a friend set off in his van about 11.00. Driving along the road at a village called Heddington near Calne we were surprised to see a magnificent pagoda in the middle of the English countryside. When I got home later, I looked it up and it is a Theravada Buddhist meditation centre which was founded by a Burmese Buddhist nun called Mother Sayamagyi and has been situated there since 1978. I thought that was great, it is amazing what you find when you go exploring.
 |
| Buddhist Centre. |
Then we arrived in Avebury. I have been here many times over the last 40 years, but never tire of visiting the stones. In case you don’t know about Avebury, it is a Neolithic henge monument containing three stone circles. One of the best-known prehistoric sites in Britain, it contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world. It is both a tourist attraction and a place of religious importance to contemporary pagans.
Constructed over several hundred years in the Third Millennium BC, during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, the monument comprises a large henge (a bank and a ditch) with a large outer stone circle and two separate smaller stone circles situated inside the centre of the monument. Its original purpose is unknown, although archaeologists believe that it was most likely used for some form of ritual or ceremony. The Avebury monument is a part of a larger prehistoric landscape containing several older monuments nearby, including West Kennet Long Barrow, Windmill Hill and Silbury Hill.
Anyway, I took a leisurely walk around and took a few photos. The stones looked great against the April sky. There were quite a few other visitors wandering about. I expect this year we won’t get many visitors from other countries, but hopefully the numbers will be made up by British tourists who will explore their own country, as foreign travel will be out of the question. After that, we repaired to Honey Street which is a little place on the Kennet & Avon canal. I like it because it is mentioned in a Van Morrison song called Pagan Streams. ‘And we walked the pagan streams, And searched for white horses on surrounding hills, We lived where dusk had meaning, And repaired to quiet sleep, where noise abated, In touch with the silence, On Honey Street, on Honey Street’.
I was pleased to find that the pub The Barge Inn has reopened because it was closed for three years. It used to be a mecca for ‘Croppies’ because you get lots of crop-circles in Wiltshire and ‘cerealogists’ from all over the world came here to study them. I had a bit of a walk along the canal looking at the boats. I think canal holidays will enjoy a boom this summer, so the Barge Inn will have a good year hopefully. As we headed homewards I took a photo of the White Horse at Cherhill which Van also might have been referring to in his song. we stopped off in Devizes because it was market day.
The market was just starting to close when we got there, so there wasn’t all that much to see or buy. We drove back to Westbury via the back roads and saw some nice villages that I had never seen before. I should mention that I treated my friend to some of my music on this journey. I played him Diversions by Barry Booth, Twelve Dreams Of Dr Sardonicus by Spirit, Parallelograms by Linda Perhacs and We Are Ever So Clean by Blossom Toes. I think he quite liked some of it. It was a really nice afternoon and great to get out and about after being cooped up for so long.
 |
| Me at the Barge Inn at Honey Street. Cheers! |
No comments:
Post a Comment