Avebury Winter Solstice 2021

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 key moment: is it the sunset the day before, the sunrise on the day itself, or either of the subsequent sunsets / sunrises? ...and then there's the issue of the precise moment of solstice, which this year happened to fall around sunset on the 21st, leading English Heritage to decide Stonehenge would be marking the event at sunrise - the following day. All of which is a longwinded way of possibly explaining why I arrived in Avebury this evening to find almost nobody there.

I'd started with lofty ambitions of doing a wild camp overnight, but after working through the practicalities of needing a safe place to park the car (coupled with the fact I'd need to be in a fit state to drive the car the next morning, so would need a decent night's sleep) I chickened out and booked a B&B for the night. Thus much like the summer solstice I stayed in East Kennet, and walked to Avebury from there. I'd originally hoped to get there in time for the sunset the day before the winter solstice, but everything that day seemed to take much longer than anticipated, so it ended up being around 6:30, and long since dark, by the time I even got to East Kennet.

Some time before 7pm I set out, in the dark, on the now familiar route from East Kennet to Avebury. Along the road to start with, then the permissive footpath which cuts a corner off by passing through a field, then over the A4 and up the little country lane which links the A4 to Avebury. Half way up that road I left and went into the neighbouring field, and followed the beautiful West Kennet Avenue of stones for the final bit of the walk to Avebury. It's a very dramatic way to arrive - perhaps how arrivals in Avebury were originally intended to be in ancient times - and particularly atmospheric in the dark.

This time I'd brought a headlamp along with me, albeit that I felt a bit too self conscious (even alone in the dark!) to actually wear it on my head, and instead just used it as a hand held torch. Thus I was actually able to take a few photos of the stones on my way, wherein you can just about recognise what I'm trying to take a photo of.

I didn't pass anyone else on foot on the way, and as I neared Avebury there was a troubling lack of light and sound, just the normal handful of lights from the village itself. When I eventually got to Avebury my suspicions were confirmed, and there was seemingly nobody else around. Certainly nobody else outdoors.

Oh well, I thought, I was here now, so I might as well make the most of it. I'd brought some wine with me - kept nicely chilled by the fact it was essentially fridge temperature outdoors - so I decided to just make myself comfortable, sit down, and enjoy the peace and quiet, and the opportunity to have the stones all to myself for a while.

The Red Lion certainly did look quite inviting, and I toyed with the idea of going for a pint, which might also have presented an opportunity to ask around as to why nobody was outside, but a quick glance through the window seemed to suggest it was just a handful of ordinary pub goers in there - not the usual solstice crowd.

Besides, once I started moving I didn't feel particularly cold, and thought I might instead walk to the Ridgeway to see if there was perhaps some kind of gathering there, as there had been at the summer solstice earlier this year.

I took the track heading east out of Avebury - the Wessex Ridgeway, also identified on the OS map as Herepath or Green Street. Beyond the farm which is on the edge of the village there's then a bridleway which crosses this track, and I followed that heading south and slightly east towards the Ridgeway proper. This time of the year, perhaps as a result of the proximity to the farm buildings, this bridleway was very muddy, and with huge puddles (pictured above), which were difficult to navigate in the dark, so this made for rather slow progress. It did, however, provide me with a wonderful sense of isolation, and despite it being a mostly cloudy evening the moon would occasionally do its best to poke through the clouds, and help to illuminate my path.

Near where this bridleway meets the Ridgeway are a number of tumuli, most of them with copses atop, and as a result they're locally referred to as the hedgehogs. I paused for a while in one of these, for a quick drink, and was of course reminded of my favourite spot on Hampstead Heath. Albeit here there are many of them, their authenticity isn't questioned, and there are no fences around any of them. So I could sit right on top of a barrow for a while, taking in the slightly weird atmosphere that these ancient places have.

I then joined the Ridgeway, hoping there might be a throng of campervans as I'd seen at the summer solstice, but to begin with at least there were none to be seen - only glimpses of perhaps a handful of vans off in the distance where the Ridgeway meets the A4 (and there's more like an "official" car park).

There may have been a couple of dozen vans parked in the proper car park in total (whereas in summer there must have been hundreds all along the side of the track), but most of them looked like the occupants were already asleep, and only one van had a group of people sitting outside it, huddled around a fire pit. As I passed they commented that I looked a bit like Mr Tumnus from Narnia. I suppose in the dim light the slightly baggy tweed trousers I had on could look a bit like a faun's legs. And I was wearing a scarf. It still seemed a bit of a stretch to me.

I reached the end of the Ridgeway a little after 10pm, and initially felt a little crestfallen at the realisation that there just wasn't a big crowd of solstice attending types anywhere. I concluded that either hanging around overnight for the winter solstice wasn't the done thing, or that perhaps I was just here one evening too early. It was around this point that I'd checked my phone and discovered English Heritage were actually staging their event at sunrise on the 22nd this year, not sunrise on the 21st.

As some small consolation, the lack of anything better to do meant I finally went to visit The Sanctuary. I had walked close by on at least two previous occasions, but hadn't been to see it on account of being too tired or it being too dark. 

I knew it had the potential to be a bit of an underwhelming site, given that none of the original posts / stones survive, their former locations now just marked by funny little concrete blocks. However I think being there in the dark, with the occasional glimpse of the moon, helped the suspension of disbelief.

Not to mention that those concrete blocks made very handy little shelves to rest a bottle / wine glass on.

I left The Sanctuary around 11pm, and decided it was probably a good time to call it a night. I followed the track which I suppose is the route of the ancient Ridgeway (although no longer part of the modern national trail) down to East Kennet. When I'd done this walk back in the summer I'd somehow managed to get lost on this relatively short straightforward route, and spent close to half an hour on a walk that even in the dark should only really be 10 or 15 minutes. Tonight though, perhaps because it was at least partly now familiar, it went much more quickly.

So what really ought to have been an adventurous wild camp in a bivvy in an ancient ditch somewhere ended up being a decidedly unadventurous night's sleep at a warm, comfortable B&B.

I set my alarm for 6am so I could walk back to Avebury once again for the sunrise the next morning, but already suspected it would be a bit of a disappointment given the weather forecast.

So, in the morning, once more along the stone avenue, and thus more pictures of standing stones in the dark. The road actually obscures part of the course of the avenue, and if proceeding along the avenue from East Kennet the first couple of stones you encounter are lurking rather unceremoniously by the side of the tarmac. There is however something oddly appealing about this - ancient things nestling between the cracks of modernity, like weeds growing between paving slabs.

It was after 7 as I proceeded along the more intact section of the avenue, still about an hour until sunrise, but I suppose you could call it first light by then, and with the help of the "Night Sight" mode on my phone's camera I was able to take reasonably clear pictures of some of the stones in the early morning gloom.

I arrived at the outer circle of Avebury at 7:20am (with sunrise scheduled at 8:10am), and was pleased to see this time at least some other people milling around. Albeit that it was clear from the unrelenting cloud cover there wasn't going to be much to see of the sunrise.

So as expected, the sunrise itself wasn't much of a spectacle - the clouds never lifted - but there was a decent turnout, and so I'm reasonably sure at least this morning I was here for the "right" (whatever that means) moment. There was a group of druidy / pagan / solstice going types, and they did some sort of ceremony after, presumably, their watches told them sunrise had happened.

As I finish writing this, on following day, when the solstice would be celebrated at Stonehenge, I see that there was actually a very nice sunrise this morning. Oh well.