This site has been known as Penning or Avebury Down 'Stone Circle', but it's actually thought to be the remains of a bell barrow. It has a 3m berm between its mound and its (now faintly perceptible) ditch. Today there are six large sarsens which make up the 16m diameter circle, with a number of smaller stones towards the still slightly raised middle. However, when the site was visited by Merewether in the 1840s he made a sketch that showed 8 stones and four pits from which others had been removed. He found pottery fragments and animal bones on partially excavating the area. Only about 250 bell barrows are known in Britain and most are in Wessex, though ones with such large stones making up the peristalith are unusual around Avebury. They were generally the pretty impressive final resting places of important men from the community.
(details from EH's record of Scheduled Monuments on Magic)
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Posted by Rhiannon
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