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Sanctuary S
Sanctuary Dec 17, 2010 13:54:06
Replying to nigelswift

nigelswift wrote:
thesweetcheat wrote:
But the problem comes that it's sometimes difficult to separate those times when he was drawing what he saw (but we can't see because it's gone since his time) and those times when he was drawing his own speculative reconstructions.
Sure. But on page 68 of Stukeley Illustrated it shows his "View near the spot of the termination of the Beckhampton Avenue" and he both writes and draws "the track of the Avenue" and shows only 4 (prostrate) stones. That seems like he recorded what he saw and didn't embellish it.
I'm sure there WOULD have been a pretty old track there as a long distance track terminates just behind his viewpoint I think, so it would be bound to carry on to the henge. I'm inclined to think his illustration on that occasion was as close to a photograph as he could manage.

What that doesn't tell us though is whether his "track" was an Avenue (stones or no stones) If I was building a stone Avenue I might get a bit peed off at the extreme ends and just mark it with pebbles.

Not sure if I'm reading you correctly here or not Nigel but when Stukeley says "the track of the Avenue" I've assumed he was meaning the track, or line that the avenue it took, rather than meaning a separate trackway. Is that what you were implying or have I misunderstood?

N nigelswift
nigelswift Dec 17, 2010 14:53:04
Replying to Sanctuary

He shows an actual track from where he is standing all the way to Avebury. It has four prostrate stones on it, just to the left of a line between him and Silbury. He labels it as "the track of the Avenue".

Interestingly, it runs across ploughed land and the furrows on each side of it curve downwards, very clearly suggesting the track was sunken (which would make it easy to have been ploughed out without trace in modern times?) and the furrows on each side don't correspond with each other - indicating the fields were definitely separated by the track and farmed independently. He'd need to be pretty crafty to depict all that if he couldn't actually see it all in front of him.

Btw he shows a house in the distance near to Silbury that is still there and he has it's positioning correct almost to an inch.

I personally think there's little doubt he saw and sketched a real track there in 1723, not a speculative one, and he believed, right or wrong, it was on the line of a prehistoric Avenue..... and actually, believing it was an Avenue doesn't make him the liar he's been called on the grounds no stones are there, now or originally. If only he'd said "here's the stoneless bit of the avenue" no-one would have said he was wrong to speculate that's what it was as no-one could prove it wasn't. ;)