Stepping Through Stones

Driving home to Cornwall after visiting my mum last week, I finally made the detour to Avebury. I’ve seen the signs so many times, always promising myself another day, and I’ve longed to visit this place ever since I scared myself to pieces as a child watching Children of the Stones.(Google it! Still utterly terrifying!) and last week I finally turned off the M4 and made the journey.

I love Wiltshire and the magic of seeing Stonehenge rise from the rolling emptiness of Salisbury Plain never fades, no matter how many times I drive the A303 or how horrific the summer traffic jams. This latest journey home from my mum’s new home took me closer to Avebury than before and the pull was too strong to resist.  The weather was good, I had the whole day and the open road was calling. It was time.

I parked and walked the short distance to the village, my eyes wide at the sheer scale of the earthworks and the number of stones scattered across undulating grassland and skirted by nettles. People walked among them, quiet and almost reverent on individual pilgrimages to the past. Some stopped to lean against the weathered sandstone. Others posed for Insta shots. One marched along with walking poles as though in a mission. The variety was a spectacle in itself and as I looked at the stones I realised they were as individual as their visitors.

Some stones glittered in the sunlight, sugar-like and equally irresistible to the touch.  A few listed. One lolled. Others huddled in clusters. A few were lonesome outliers. Although there were plenty of people weaving their way through the circles there was a sense of stillness and tranquillity that slowed my heartbeat too. Unlike the caterpillar surge of visitors at Stonehenge, trudging feet accompanied by the constant shush of passing traffic, Avebury possessed the stillness found in a cathedral or the dense green heart of the forest.

The stones rose from the earth as though grown from it rather than being placed there by determined and skilled hands. Weathered and immovable, they had outlasted belief systems and civilisations and survived attacks by fearful Puritans and pilfering builders who utilised them for barns and dwellings. Over 4000 years old, each was bowed with Time’s weight,  circles of silence in a noisy world.

Being here was unsettling in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The energy was so strong I felt queasy and giddy, as though teetering on the edge of something vast or spinning. I ventured into the crystal shop hoping I would find something to ground me, but it was only when I leaned against one of the stones that the odd feeling ebbed. Coolness seeped through me, like being washed clean in a sudden shower, and I sat down with my back against a stone to recover. I closed my eyes and listened to the breeze and the purr of distant traffic. Like the stones, I had no obvious purpose here. I was simply being. A human being.

It struck me then, how seldom we allow ourselves to simply be. There’s always something else to do; a book to write, house to clean, call to make…The guilt of not succumbing to busyness can be overwhelming and I often teeter on the edge of burnout. Here with no phone, social media, notebook, companion or a place to be I existed alongside the vast sky, the rolling plains and the wise, watchful stones. It was impossible not to wonder who might have sat here before me or think of men and women who had placed the stone here. I thought of The kings and queens who had reigned. The wars that the stones witnessed. The joys and the grief. All gone but never really lost while the stones remained.

The age of these stones was too much to comprehend. It felt a little like gazing up into the night sky and trying to understand how the starlight twinkling down had taken millions of years had to reach me.  It had been beamed from a distant sun long before there were even people on this little planet. Impossible and head hurty stuff. Beside these stones, as with the universe, I felt small, but also significant too because in spite of all the odds I existed. I was part of a long line of humans who have looked up at the sky, down at the earth, and at these stones asking the same questions: What matters? What remains of us? What is it all about?  The purpose of the stones was lost to time, but they remained even though their meaning was lost. There was a message here if I could only dig deep enough to catch its quicksilver brightness.

People had left small offerings at the stones. There were flowers and feathers tucked into crannies. An earring was jammed in a crevice. Another had a joss stick cantilevered into a crack beside a 5p pice. These quiet gestures of gratitude and reverence were moving. Although we live in a secular, high-tech age where logic and science are lauded, here is a void in us that yearns for more and searches for meaning and which links us to the people who placed the stones in an attempt to do the same. We are endlessly connected to each other now yet lonelier than ever before, but in Avebury’s ancient stone circles people were connecting by walking the old banks and standing still for a while. Maybe this was always the purpose of Avebury? A place where people came on pilgrimage to stand and feel the earth’s pulse. Where they felt a sense of connection to one another and the natural world.

It felt comfortingly similar to Cornwall, a county infused with the same sense of ancient awe and enigma. One summer day I rode my horse high on Bodmin Moor and saw a stooped man in a brown robe on the far hill where there was once an earthwork. My horse stood still, ears pricked and nostrils flared, and we stared. Then I blinked and the man was gone, in his place a hunched and lichened stone which I rode past with a sense that I was being watched. The sensation of stillness was the same as at Avebury and I recognised it. These are the thin places, where the veil between past and present, sacred and ordinary, feels gossamer light, and which draw me and inspire my stories.

As I walked through the stones of Avebury and back to my car, I couldn’t but think of Outlander too. Would I slip through time like Diana Gabaldon’s heroine? The idea was compelling and frightening too - as was the notion of slipping between worlds. In a way, that’s what stories do, I think. Stories are standing stones made of words and they are what we raise against the tide of forgetting. They give us meaning and shape our world.

I often ask myself why I write, and the answer is clear in moments like this Avebury visit. My books are my sarsen stones. My great-aunt Ella’s story became The Letter and in telling her story, I was also searching for mine. The Promise told the hidden stories of the black GIs in Cornwall and revealed my own findings about the place I call home. Polwenna Bay was my way of holding onto Cornwall when I was far away. As Seamus Heaney says, writing is a way “to set the darkness echoing” and to see ourselves. Writing is the hope that we leave something that endures when we are gone. Maybe that’s why the themes of my books circle around the same truths: home, longing, belonging, what survives after loss. The people who built Avebury left no words or explanations, just the silent stones yet through the henges and the sarsens and the barrows we hear their voices saying they mattered. Writing is my way of raising stones and saying I was here. It’s my way of making connections across time and of calling into the silence.

When I left Avebury and turned west, the autumn light was slanting across the fields and the sun was beckoning me home. The equinox had just passed; the year’s balance was tipping and the seasons turning as they always do. As I exchanged stillness for the relentless flow of the M4 I carried with me not just the memory of the stones but the reminder that although out time is fleeting, we can choose what we leave behind.