John Goes For a Walk

By happy coincidence, we drove back to London from a weekend in the Wye Valley the day before the winter solstice, and the girls were going to stay with friends near Oxford. So that seemed like a great opportunity while (more or less) passing by for me to spend a night in Avebury. It seems, however, that I'm still a bit confused about what exactly happens at what time and on what day when it comes to solstices. For the summer solstice earlier this year, it had seemed to be the case that many people arrive the evening before the actual day of the solstice, watch the sunset, and then potentially stay up all night waiting for the sunrise on the day itself. I perhaps naively assumed, therefore, that this might also be the case for the winter solstice. Figuring out when to be there is made all the more difficult by the fact the solstice isn't on a fixed date (somewhere between the 20th and 22nd December), and moreover different people seem to have different opinions on which is the ...