I live in Swindon and get mildly irritated when people refer to it as a 'sprawling new town' as one of the above posters did. Old Swindon has evidence of human occupation dating back to 5,000BC. It is mentioned in the Doomsday book and grew up as a hilltop market town with close links to Marlborough. New Swindon (which is now Victorian) evolved when Brunel drove his railway through and 'old' and 'new' gradually met up. The spawling housing estates/developments, industrial and retail parks have appeared from the 1950s onwards, which is why we do not want this special piece of land with all its historic (and prehistoric) associations gobbled up too.
I found this post from RedBrickDream very interesting as it clearly implys the landowner is telling porkies and hoping no one will check out his claims that the stone circle is not ancient.
Quote:
The following extract comes from Aubrey Burl's Prehistoric Avebury (1979). Yale University Press, New Haven. p 237. [My comments in parentheses].
Much farther away, nine miles to the north of Avebury are the fallen pillars of the Coate Circle, prostrate and three-quarters covered in turf but when A.D. Passmore probed the ground [research published in 1894] he found several were up to three metres long. Like Langdean [also known as Little Avebury] there was the suggestion of an avenue leading to the ring from the north [the course of the existing DayHouse Lane, past the Richard Jefferies Museum back towards Swindon]. It has been thought that Richard Jefferies first recognised the remains of this ring and, undoubtedly, he had an affinity with the people who had moulded the ancient landscape before him. [...]
In the case of Coate, however it was John Aubrey, two hundred years before Jefferies who wrote that "at Broome near Swindon in Wiltshire", hardly a mile from Coate, "in the middle of a pasture ground called Long-stone is a great Stone ten foot high (or better) standing upright", the ruin of a circle with a row of stones " in a right line" leading to it. Unquote
