From the great outer circle two avenues of stones, each a mile and a half long and 50 feet wide, extended outwards. The WEST KENNET AVENUE reaches out to the SE and terminates on Overton Hill at the Sanctuary. Originally consisting of 100 pairs of stones, only 27 stones remain although markers provide an idea of how the avenue snaked into Avebury. The stones alternate in shape between wide angular shapes and tall thinner ones and many believe this to be female and male representations.

The BECKHAMPTON AVENUE extended in a SW direction and the only surface sign left is three quarters of a mile to the west of the stone circle where the LONGSTONES or ADAM & EVE stand. Eve is the eastern of the 2 stones and would have formed part of the avenue while Adam was once part of a three sided cove arrangement.

There is nothing quite like Stonehenge anywhere in the world and for 5000 years it has drawn visitors to it. Standing like Îsoldiers of time,' we shall never know what drew people here over the centuries or why hundreds of people struggled over thousands of years to build this monument, but visitors from all over the world come to marvel at this amazing feat of engineering. To this day Stonehenge remains a mystery.

Before Stonehenge was built thousands of years ago, the whole of Salisbury Plain was a forest of towering pines and hazel woodland. Over centuries the landscape changed to open chalk downland. What you see today is about half of the original monument, some of the stones have fallen down, others have been carried away to be used for building or to repair farm tracks and over centuries visitors have added their damage too. It was quite normal to hire a hammer from the blacksmith in Amesbury and come to Stonehenge to chip bits off. As you can image this practice is no longer permitted!

What you see today is an outer ring of upright stones set in a circle 100 feet (30 metres) across ö each stone towering about 30 feet (6 metres) above. The whole circle was topped with a continuous ring of lintels. Each of those lintels fitted on top of the uprights to form a giant circle. Inside the outer ring is another circle of different shorter stones, a horseshoe of blue stones. These were brought from the mountains in South-west Wales, and inside them, another horseshoe made of five giant archways of three stones called trilithons.

Maiden Bradley, the home of the Duke of Somerset, is a village on the Somerset border. The B3092 road that joins Frome to Mere runs through the middle of the village. The parish lies on chalk and upper greensand, and was well known as an area rich in ‘chalk-greensand’ fossils. It gets its name from the leper hospital for maidens that was founded here in the 12th century. The word Bradley means a wide clearing or wood. One and a half miles southwest of the village is the deserted medieval village of Yarnfield. Formerly in the county of Somerset, it was transferred to Wiltshire in 1895 and is a hamlet of the parish of Maiden Bradley. As a manor in the 17th century it was held by Lieut. -General Edmund Ludlow, a member of the tribunal which condemned Charles I.

The earliest reference to the village is a Saxon land charter dated 878, but the community’s origins can be traced back thousands of years. There are numerous tumuli in Maiden Bradley, including a Bronze Age barrow opened by Richard Colt Hoare in 1807.