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Location: Avebury lies in the heart of the Wiltshire Downs just west of Marlborough - the most ancient borough in England. Avebury is ninety miles west of London and twenty miles north of Stonehenge.

It contains the largest known stone ring in the world - though there is no proof.

Older than the more famous Stonehenge, and for many visitors far more spectacular, the multiple rings of Avebury are cloaked with mysteries which archaeologists have only begun to unravel.

Avebury stone circles are thought to have been constructed in neolithic times between 2500 to 2000 BC.

The 'Beaker people': so called after their pottery, are thought to have played a major role in their formation, as they did with Stonehenge.

Some people believe there is an exterrestrial link.

The village of Avebury in Wiltshire has given its name to one of the greatest stone circles in the British Isles.

Similar to Stonehenge and many other megalithic monuments in the British Isles, Avebury is a composite construction that was added to and altered during several periods.

As the site currently exists, the great circle consists of a grass-covered, chalk-stone bank that is 1,396 feet in diameter (427 meters) and 20 feet high (6 meters) with a deep inner ditch having four entrances at the cardinal compass points.

Just inside the ditch, which was clearly not used for defensive purposes, lies a grand circle of massive and irregular sarsen stones enclosing approximately 28 acres of land.

This circle, originally composed of at least 98 stones but now having only 27, itself encloses two smaller stone circles, each being about 340 feet (104 meters) in diameter. The two inner circles are believed to have been constructed first, around 2600 BC, while the large outer ring and earthwork dates from 2500 BC.

The construction of the Avebury complex must have required enormous efforts on the part of the local inhabitants. The sarsen stones, ranging in height from nine to over twenty feet and weighing as much as 40 tons, were first hewn from bedrock and then dragged or sledded a distance of nearly two miles from their quarry site.