I think the "moat" or ditch is the key - and I like the idea of it being water-filled...

I like that idea as well Pilgrim. It's probably an over simplification but Avebury seems like a good starting point to argue the toss over bank, ditch and moat structures. It's been said elsewhere that the water table at Avebury, when the ditch was first cut, was not high enough to fill it with water. I don't know if that has ever actually been proved but even if it has it does not discount the possibly that the ditch was filled with water by other means.

Like most here I've walked along the top of the bank at Avebury, looking down at the central area(s), and the overwhelming impression you get is just that - one of <i>looking down</i>. The place is not a defensive structure - no way. It's a theatre, in the broadest sense of the word, a place where people gathered, watched ceremonies, perhaps engaged in sports, held trials and markets, complained about the weather and generally chewed the fat. For god's sake, this was the most spectacular place in ancient Britain - what else would have been going on there! I've said all this before but it beggars belief that some still think it was a quiet little place with a few mysterious folk doing a few astrological ceremonies a couple of times of year. Avebury, with it's fantastic circles and avenues of stone, not to mention Silbury, the Sanctuary, the Kennet long barrows, the Ridgeway and everything else within its landscape would have been known far and wide to the folk of Neolithic Britain and would have been a place of pilgrimage and festivity.

Evidence of all this? Nope, don't have any. Common sense? Yep, plenty of that, and the overwhelming feeling that Avebury was one of several spectacularly vibrant centres in prehistoric Britain - if not the whole of Europe.

And as for, "Littlestonian porkers, or porkies..." Pha! You just wait Nigel until I've got my megalithic sausage machine up and running again :-)