Avebury, Honey Street, & White Horses On Surrounding Hills.

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!

Thought For The Day.

 

Wednesday: It has rained steadily all day. I haven’t got anything much to say. I saw on the News that astronaut Michael Collins has died aged 90. He was a great man, the man who orbited the moon on his own while his two friends Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin explored the lunar surface. I thought I’d just give you one little quote by Michael Collins that has a huge message which sadly the politicians choose to ignore.

“I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let's say 100,000 miles, their outlook would be fundamentally changed. The all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.”

Supermoon & Other Ramblings.

Tuesday: The sunshine disappeared today, and we had some rain for the first time in ages. I went for a walk uptown and on the way home stopped at Andrea’s flower shop. I bought a dianthus and a fuchsia which I planted in pots. I also got a trailing verbena and a petunia for my hanging baskets. I pottered about in the garden for about an hour until it started raining steadily. Then I went to the pub for a couple of pints. 

This evening I was intently following the football. My team Peterborough United had the chance to secure automatic promotion if they won tonight. Sadly, they only managed a 2-2 draw after leading 2-0. They have a tough game on Saturday against Lincoln which will be a tense game because Lincoln also has a chance of promotion. I will let you know how it all pans out. I just thought I would show you this great photo of the pink supermoon over Stonehenge last night. See you tomorrow.

 

Thinking Like A Mountain.

Monday: The big event for me today was having a haircut for the first time in ages. I’m not sure I like it after all that, but it is done now. This afternoon I just sat in my yard and enjoyed the sunshine as Emmylou Harris, Linda Rondstadt & Dolly Parton sang quietly in the background. I managed to finish one of my books that I have been dipping into off and on for about three months. It is called A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. I am glad I finally finished reading it. It was published in 1949 and is regarded as a landmark book in the conservation movement. I enjoyed the monthly sketches of the wildlife on his Wisconsin farm. As I am British, sometimes I didn’t understand what the birds and creatures were that he was referring to because we don’t have them here. I can see the importance of this book and I think it is a shame that despite it being a best-selling book it failed to have any impact on those in power, and now we are reaping the harvest of how nature has been abused. I did have some reservations about the book. Aldo Leopold didn’t seem to be totally against hunting for instance. He reminded me a bit of the Duke Of Edinburgh who was president of the World Wildlife Fund, but still hunted tigers in India. Some people seem to believe that we should ensure that wildlife survives so that we can shoot them. I should not be too harsh on the book though because it was published seventy years ago, and the world has changed a lot since then. The issues that Aldo Leopold warned us about have now become critical and unless we sort it out in the next few years then we face extinction. That is how serious the situation is. I will just leave you with a quote from one of my favourite sections of the book which I found very moving. It is called Thinking Like A Mountain and concerns the folly of thinking that shooting wolves ensures lots of deer to hunt. What happens is that the whole balance of nature is destroyed.

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes-something only known to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves meant a hunter's paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view".