How Early Twentieth-Century Modernity Gave Avebury Its Folklore

In 1900 the Wiltshire village of Avebury occupied a quiet and unassuming place in the public consciousness. Avebury was a small rural village, supporting a population of c.600 individuals who were largely employed in arable farming, straw plaiting and hat making, and life in Avebury looked the same as that of any other rural village. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, however, there was a detectible shift in the atmosphere of the place. Avebury came to host an increasing number of visitors who observed their locality from every angle. Motor cars carrying members of antiquarian societies arrived in droves, long distance walkers approached along disused, ancient trackways, tiny forms surveyed the village from the nearby Silbury Hill, and on several occasions the community were subject to the hum of a slowly circling aircraft overhead. It is difficult to know how the locals of Avebury responded to this new interest in their village, but there is no doubt they were aware that people were coming to look at their stones again.

At the very start of the twentieth century the neolithic monument at Avebury – the world’s largest stone circle – consisted of just thirty-one stones, with fifteen fallen and sixteen standing. Interest in the site was confined largely to specialist antiquarian audiences and, most curiously, the site was not attached to any popular folkloric legends as to how the colossal megaliths came to stand in the village. Then something shifted. This talk will explore how the early twentieth century saw archaeologists, writers and philosophers become increasingly interested in ancient spaces like Avebury and advocate for embodied, immersive interactions with these sites which emphasised the importance of drawing connections between ancient landmarks. This phenomenon was born out of a distinctively twentieth-century context, as modern ideas and technologies converged to shift artistic and academic conceptions of the site. Drawing on the work of archaeologists, folklorists, and writers including R. Hippisley Cox, Edith Olivier, H.G Wells and Maud Cunnington, we will explore how this movement created a new way of engaging with the Avebury landscape which prioritised human interaction and led to a collection of encounters with the site which came to provide Avebury with the tradition it had always lacked. These same concepts came to influence archaeological investigations as well as heritage preservation schemes, directly shaping the physical and cultural space we encounter at Avebury today.

Niamh Lawlor is a third-year PhD student at the University of Birmingham working in partnership with the Midlands4Cities / AHRC doctoral training award. Lawlor’s research explores creative responses to pre-historic and ancient monuments in early twentieth-century writing, employing a research practice which has involved fieldwork in the UK and Ireland. Lawlor has also worked on projects including The Avebury Papers, an AHRC funded project working to digitise the early twentieth-century archive held at Avebury, as well as acting as a Research Assistant for the Arts of Place research centre based at the University of Birmingham.

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Image credit: MikPeach File:Wiltshire-Avebury.jpg - Wikimedia Commons