The following is a visual documentation of 3 trips we made in different conditions to this heritage site. On the 2nd trip in February 2009 Neil Mortimer gained us access to the bell tower in Avebury’s parish church, so the sequence starts with these birds’ eye views of its graveyard and the stones beyond, to give an idea of the scope of the monuments in this coloured village.

Independently we had visited Avebury on various occasions since the 1970s, but for the purposes of this survey, the first time we went there was on New Year’s Day in 2009, bitterly cold. The bulk of the photos are from this trip; it was a traverse, from the village centre, down the Avenue (where the male and female stones are poised on opposite sides), finally to Silbury Hill and West Kennet Long Barrow, where we suspect unknown phenomena are yet to be pinpointed, if they ever can be.

The visual sequence has echoes of Derek Jarman’s 1971 film “A Journey to Avebury”, shot on Super 8 (and you can find it easily on www.youtube.com) but this time it’s with the accuracy of a Leica lens and a Panasonic logic board. Avebury is a site that has fruitful possibilities in terms of photography and observation, but is nevertheless resistant to acoustic documentation because of its public profile and the drone of nearby traffic on the A4.